Post-Depressive Past

My recent reading has been determined by those around me in the most figurative of senses - the public library hold list.  I have a number (okay, way too many) books out of the library and, as other patrons put holds on the books, needed to return them.  Consequently, I read these three books in chronological order, and by the third book was so depressed I found it difficult to continue reading.  All 3 books are worth reading, but this should serve as a warning not to read them consecutively as I did.

As someone born toward the end of the baby-boomers, and who grew up on the East Coast, I remember much, but not all, of the way Bill Bryson describes growing up.  (My daughter has a warped view of how old I am, seeming to believe that all cars had manual transmissions when I learned how to drive - so not true.)  It was a different time.  Better?  Perhaps.  But definitely different.  Rascism was okay, as were chemicals in your food and pretty much everywhere and smoking, again, pretty much everywhere.  But people didn't live behind locked doors and kids played outside without adult supervision without fear of kidnapping.  It was a simpler time when we didn't need (or maybe just want) as many material things as we seem to now.  There's a reason why closets in older houses are small.  People didn't have as many clothes.  Do you ever watch The Honeymooners?  Ralph and Alice were thought of as ordinary people, funny, but ordinary.  Kids watching that show today think Ralph and Alice live at, or below, the poverty level.  They had a two-room apartment and, while Alice didn't have a fur coat and they didn't go on vacations, they never thought of themselves as poor.
This is a funny book, not quite as funny as A Walk in the Woods, but funny.  And yes, Bill Bryson, many other people remember George and Gracie.  But, just as in A Walk in the Woods, Bryson notes all the things that have gone wrong with our "progress".  In A Walk in the Woods, the concern seemed environmental.  In Thunderbolt Kid, it is the demise of small family-held farms and real downtowns with individual stores.  Things we cannot get back and don't really comprehend the impact of their loss until reading this book.

I don't usually read Stephen King. He is too scary for me. But this was a good book and I'm glad I invested the time to read it.  We all know from the reviews that this is about a high school English teacher who goes through a time portal to stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  Spoiler alert - the time portal puts him into the late 1950s so he spends years in the past waiting for Nov. 22, 1963.  So once again I was reading about how much better the past was.  I didn't see Bill Bryson in the bibliography but perhaps Steven King was using his own memories.  Food tasted better, the air was cleaner (hard to believe with all those factories) and life was simpler.  You could even get used to being without the internet!  I don't particularly like the ending, but then, this is Stephen King so I should not have expected a happy ending, should I? Although the ending is happy in its own way. Since I was too young at the time of JFK's death to really remember the impact on the country, I was surprised to read that it tore the country apart. (Here again my daughter seems to think that I should have a clear memory of this time and that might be why these books affected me this way.  Not true, dear, I was little.)  Sadly, I was not surprised at the ineptitude of the government in its dealings with Lee Harvey Oswald.  It is clear that King did a great deal of research for this book and the timing of its release to coincide with the 50th anniversary of JFK's presidency could not have been better.
Would the world be a different place if Jack Kennedy had lived? For sure. Would it be a better place? We'll never know. But Stephen King certainly gave me a lot to think about.

Next up were Jackie Kennedy's conversations with Arthur Schlesinger recorded in the spring following her husband's death.  That is how she refers to it:  Not when Jack was murdered, not when Jack was assassinated, but when Jack died.  I had just finished reading 900 pages of Stephen King, hoping against hope that Jack Kennedy could be saved (yes, I know in the real world he wasn't).  Perhaps because of that, I felt like JFK had just died.  It felt wrong to even rate the book on Goodreads because it is just so personal.  There were parts of the book, for example when she talks about JFK's relationships with his children and with his brother Bobby, and JFK's back problems and his plans for his life after the presidency, when I just wanted to weep.  And the pictures, oh, the pictures.
On a purely analytical note, this book shows just how much the role of women in their marriages and the role of the president's spouse have evolved in 50 years.  If you are looking for an insight into JFK's presidency, there are better books.  But nothing could make you understand better the impact of his death on his family.  Jackie Kennedy went from being First Lady to being a single mother of two small children needing to find a new home for them in minutes.  I also got a better appreciation of their marriage.  Marilyn Monroe and all the dalliances notwithstanding, for a few short years we all had Camelot.