This month, we read the brilliant biography of Confederate general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson titled Rebel Yell by local Austinite S. C. Gwynne.

In 2024, we read an earlier book of his titled Empire of the Summer Moon, a book soon to be taken on as a project by no less than Tyler Sheridan. Athenaeum was therefore already familiar with this author.

But since Sam lives in Austin and one of our members has a connection, an invitation was extended, and he accepted! So we were very thrilled to have him join our meeting to talk about his book on Jackson.

Sam Gwynne has won numerous awards not only for his books but also for articles he has written as a journalist. Most notably, he is a Pulitzer finalist and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.

Gwynne is in the pink shirt

We wondered how his presence would alter the normal flow of the meeting. Given his long research into the subject matter, would it kill the normal interaction? Would we feel inclined to defer to his expertise, turning the evening into more of an extended Q&A or lecture format?

Fortunately, that did not happen. This reporter is happy to say that while he did not hold back his comments, neither did he dominate, and it turned out to be a wonderful evening and great conversation. The fact is no doubt due to the fact that many in our group also have considerable knowledge and depth of reading on the Civil War and brought no small weight and eloquence to the meeting.

Another question we had going in was, What are Gwynne’s own sympathies with regard to the man Jackson and the Civil War? He certainly painted a full picture in the book and spared no elaboration of Jackson’s military genius nor his personal flaws and extreme eccentricities.

It came out early that Gwynne identifies as “a Yankee,” and he comes from a long line of Yankees. He was born in Massachusetts and has degrees from Princeton and Johns Hopkins Universities. He has not the smallest place in his heart for the cause of the South.

But how can he write so winsomely about a Southern General as a Yankee?

“Writers tend to fall in love with their subjects,” he said. He faces a mental challenge of holding in tension the different sides of the man without running away with one side over the other.

We talked about a point the book addresses: the Southern trope about the war being a response to “Northern aggression.” Was the Civil War about Northern aggression or about slavery?

He answered, “Read the Articles of Secession. It was clearly about slavery from beginning to end.”

Asked if he enjoyed writing the book, he answered, “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” It was a 4-year project for him.

Any qualms about Gwynne’s sympathies or his integrity as a writer were laid to rest by the end of the night. Taking a tour through that chapter of American History is a hard thing: the great amount of bloodshed, brothers killing brothers, the hospitals filled with mangled bodies, the death toll from dysentery and other diseases, compelled marching through extremes of cold and privation left us astonished and glad we’ve never had to live that way.

And we all came away with a fresh reminder that the Civil War is maddeningly complicated to understand.

Last Saturday (June 14) was officially the 300th meeting of the Austin Athenaeum. Counting by years, the 25th anniversary meeting was held in February of 2025.

What an amazing and rare thing for a book club.

We have only missed a few monthly meetings. Three times our meeting did not take place in the first year when the group was still getting organized. Twice we did not meet during the infamous lockdown of COVID-19. Otherwise, this group has met rain or shine, hot or cold, for richer or poorer.

The founding members (John, Bob, Dave and Peter) first met in February of 2000 on Dave’s back porch, just a month short of starting with the new millennium. (Your narrator was not yet in Austin; I say “we” in the editorial sense. But I knew about the establishment of the group, and I read the books in absentia.) When we had our first meeting:

• the World Wide Web, also known then as the “information superhighway” was only just being harnessed as a possible business application
• mobile phones did only one thing—make voice calls. And mobile phones were generally despised as the accoutrements of pretentious, rich, Wall Street types who felt they were simply too important not to be reachable at all times
• no children, teens, or college students had cell phones
• there was no such thing as “social media”
• ChatGPT was just a twinkle in Ray Kurtzweil’s eye
• the Twin Towers were still standing in Manhattan

The first few books we selected were

Ideas Have Consequences

Homer’s Odyssey,

and King Solomon’s Mines

The entire record of Athenaeum book selections is available for your perusal via a link in the left sidebar under “Reading Record” (on cell phone, scroll all the way to the bottom.) Or else click here.

The Austin Athenaeum is quite something, and we all recognize it and toast it regularly.

The book is called Stoner, by John Williams.

If you have heard of it, good for you. We all should have heard of it but most of us had not until it was proposed several times and finally won the vote.

The protagonist William Stoner grew up a Missouri farm boy. He did not have any advantages of education or wealth, social or class status. His life had hardly begun until, as a young man, he expressed a desire to get a college degree and leave the farm. And I think this does a lot to frame what should be expected of his life.

His ensuing life of personal victories and defeats, localized and ordinary as they were, were natural to the soil in which he was grown.

Discussion in our meeting went on at some length over whether Stoner was a loser, or whether he was an existential hero in his own context.

He can be admired and loved not because he attained widespread recognition and fame, not because he was a great leader or a victor in battle. But in a narrative sense, he was heroic for his endurance, patience, and his ultimate excellence as a scholar and an educator.

The list of victories and defeats is about even, but they are all personal. It would be unfair to categorize Stoner as one or the other, to label him a “winner” or a “loser” based on any tally of events, because he experienced clear victories and clear defeats.

Stoner endured the vicissitudes of an unremarkable, 20th-century American university professor. I was interested in his life because of the uncanny way that a reader may see his own vicissitudes reflected in Stoner’s life and the inevitability of events. Who did not know, for example, when it first started, that Stoner’s affair with Katherine Driscoll would end in discovery and dissolution?

Who did not sense, from the stiffness of his courtship with Edith, the dysfunctional nature of Edith’s family and upbringing, and the colossal failure of their wedding night, that the marriage would forever be a liability and a hindrance to Stoner’s career?

And the swiftness and ease with which his rival Hollis Lomax rose to a position over him could not have ended but with some kind of modest vindication and a minor triumph, which it did.

The wreckage of his family, while not a triumph in any sense of the word, did play out sadly and with some closure and schadenfreude with Edith going a little crazy, no longer able to control him, and daughter Grace finding a dark solace in alcoholism and freedom from her mother.

In fact, while I and the rest of our group overall claimed great enjoyment from the book and respect for John Williams’ control with pacing, development, and beauty of language, I can name two issues with the book. I loved the book and think everyone should read it; that doesn’t mean it is impervious to critique.

First, as indicated above, the predictability of the outcomes of various relationships and circumstances. While there is a cognitive satisfaction in ‘just deserts’ and suspension and resolve—seeing the craven evildoers repudiated and protagonists upheld—it does leave us intrigue-seekers a little wanting.

I feel a similar way when poorly planned movies do the same thing, and we know in the first 15 minutes where this is going.

It is interesting how inevitability can be satisfying while predictability is usually disappointing. I feel both after reading this book.

The second critique is contained somewhere in the sentiment that I know I will never get around to reading this book a second time.

It does not contain enough to ponder. Maybe that’s a regular feature of realism. There is no action or dialog that left me in thought, feeling a second read would be as rewarding as the first. The wealth of the book is accessible with a single pass through the narrative dream.

Stoner has been described by some critics as “the perfect novel” which is a heady encomium and shouldn’t be leveled lightly. I can agree if what we mean is Williams’ writerly control, his patience, his measurement of every dimension, and his masterful drawing of each character. For these we are thankful to the author. I always want to finish a book with warm feelings toward the author for his or her gift.

But there was lots of telling when we might have wished for showing, a fair number of unsurprising plot trajectories, and no sense that I wanted to “see that movie again.”

I’d say, find another way to praise the book than “the perfect novel.” I prefer, “the best book you’ve never heard of.”

April’s book was To Kill A Mockingbird, a book firmly ensconced in the American literary canon. It is therefore something of an enigma that, while many of us read it in high school, it has never been selected in our group.

Until now.

While the story of Atticus, Jem and Scout, and the mystery of Boo Radley is well-known to most people (with Gregory Peck’s face indelibly associated with Atticus Finch), I had forgotten much of the book’s additional side stories and secondary characters that give it even greater depth:

• Mrs. Dubose, the crotchety, insulting elderly woman who torments Jem from her front porch, and whom we learn later is a morphine addict.
• Dolphus Raymond and his black mistress with whom he has multiracial children, who also pretends to drink liquor from a bottle in a paper bag to give people a reason to write him off.
• Heck Tate, the sheriff of Maycomb. Where was the name ‘Heck’ when we were trying to name our baby boys?
• Calpurnia, the Finch’s black cook and strict disciplinarian to the children.
• The Ewell family, Bob (father) and Mayella (daughter), white trash.
• Maudie Atkinson, woman across the street, friend of the children, and whose house burned down but she didn’t care.
• Aunt Alexandra, relative who comes to live with the Finches and disapproves of Atticus’s laxity in allowing the children to mingle with the lower-class
• The rabid dog

All these are renewed favorites brought vividly to life by Harper Lee and still recognizable in our world 60 years later.

Matt had the honors of giving the opening essay in which he skillfully summarized the contrasts, conflicts, hypocrisies, and major themes of the book. He described the publication history and the way in which the book began as a collection of stories that editors helped Lee turn into a unified novel. Interesting stuff.

It was observed by me and other people that again and again the several subplots in the book mirrored the main, public drama of the treatment by the white people of Maycomb of Tom Robinson, accused of raping Mayella Ewell. Tom’s sickeningly unjust conviction and subsequent death was revealed and re-portrayed in parallel accounts of social outcasts who are unknown and therefore feared, considered harmful, who are then persecuted and either die or are killed:

1. Mrs. Dubose. The rich and bitter widow who insults Jem and his father as he walks by her house. Jem despises her, but he is led by Atticus to understand her and even respect her in the wake of her death and his discovery of her morphine addiction.
2. Dolphus Raymond. A social outcast, not killed, but despised and ostracized for his integration with the black community.
3. The children’s fear and suspicion toward Arthur (Boo) Radley. This is again based on lack of understanding and assumption that he is mad or violent. Most interestingly, in the children’s games they are playing out what’s happening in the adult world.
4. The whole black population are feared and despised by most of the white people
5. The rabid dog. The poor creature is a terror to the town, an animal, a stranger, and is shot down in the street by Atticus. It is a shocking disconnected parallel to Tom Robinson who was shot and killed while trying to escape from jail.
6. Even in one fleeting passage in which Scout is about to kill a pill bug/roly poly. Jem is older and wiser and discourages Scout from killing it just because it’s not doing any harm.

In one way or another, these are different manifestations or illustrations of the title of the book. Kill all the blue jays you want, Atticus says, because they are hateful birds. But it is a sin to kill a mockingbird; they do no harm, but they just make lovely music for everyone to hear.

Chris summarized the theme in the phrase, empathy leads to tolerance. The old idea of walking around in someone else’s shoes. The few who do find their fears turn to understanding and building of community.

William pointed out the strata of society deeply intrenched in the South, and indeed everywhere: The Cunninghams, The Ewells (in some ways below the blacks), the Black people, the white middle/upper class as perpetuated by Aunt Alexandra. He further noted how much death there is in the book: Tom Robinson, Bob Ewell, the dog, Boo Radley, Mr & Mrs Radley, Mrs. Dubose, and of course Atticus is a widower. The deaths start to add up and become a significant feature of the book.

An interesting question came up: is Atticus a good father? He allows his children to call him by his first name, he seems disconnected from the daily concerns of their lives, and never disciplines beyond an understated, adult-like scolding although they frequently disobey his instructions. He scandalized the Ladies Mission Society and Aunt Alexandra by not enforcing the social codes that they wanted him to impose on his children. But his method was actually a good one; he doesn’t care about social codes, but where his parenting becomes active is in teaching them to think rightly, to have a soul, to consider the suffering of others, and to labor for justice and equality even if success is unlikely.

Finally, what is the pattern of character development in the book? Who grows, becomes somehow wiser or transformed through the events?

It was noted that Atticus and Bob Ewell seem to be great poles of good and evil. They do not grow or change but they are not the characters we follow in the book. Tom Robinson is a centrally tragic figure, one whose only transformation is to destruction. Clearly Jem and Scout develop over the years, symbolically in their discovery and embracing of Boo Radley and more generally in the development of a sense of racial justice.

But the real weight of the book is in showing how such development is needed in the townspeople of Maycomb and yet does not take place. Only the slightest change is detected in very few, for example in sheriff Heck Tate, who does not support Atticus’s legal defense and yet committed enough to law and duty and friendship with Atticus to protect him and uphold the law. The testimonies in the trial so clearly exonerated Tom that people seemed to be left silent, and yet it was not enough to overcome historic prejudices. But we get the impression that just by watching the court case, the weight of the evidence, and the hypocrisy and clear hatred raging in the breasts of so many, when it was all over, maybe just maybe the community is one small step closer on a long road to enacting real justice, a road we are still on and still have a long way to go.

How long until we learn our lesson about underestimating books? February’s book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, turned out to be, for this writer and many of our group, a delightful surprise. Why did this happen? It’s an important lesson.

Most of us had seen the movie, which was fairly one-dimensional. Also, many of us were not paying attention to contemporary American authors in 1962. So most of us came to the book with low expectations, thinking it would mainly be a protest novel against psychiatric methods of the 60’s, especially electroshock therapy.

On the contrary, Cuckoo’s Nest is a multi-dimensional book, a fact that became clear the more our discussion progressed. As frequently happens, each one of our group brought out new observations about themes, symbols, and character details that turned the book into a new light.

The narrator is Chief Bromden, the tall, half-Native American who is presumed by all to be deaf and mute, but secretly hears what medical staff think they are saying in private. His prose begins a little choppy, either to illustrate his mental illness, poor education, or the possibility that English is not his first language.

As pointed out in the opening essay, emasculation is an important theme in the book. The “Big Nurse,” Miss Ratched, frequently diminishes and controls the men, keeping them fearful and submissive. Her piercing eyes alone are enough to quell most of the inmates.

There are numerous images of reduced manhood. One inmate kills himself in a bathroom by emasculating himself and bleeding to death. The stuttering character Billy Bibbit is a minor character but he lives in fear of his domineering mother; he is safe from her oppression only to have it replaced by Nurse Ratched. When Billy loses his virginity with a smuggled-in prostitute, he momentarily is cured of his stutter for the first and only time in the book. He is liberated and emboldened and transformed, ready to stand up to Nurse Ratched. But she promises to report to his illicit behavior to his disapproving mother, and he takes his own life shortly after.

Another theme is being without a voice, as seen in Chief Bromden’s muteness (doubly significant for the fact that he is part Native American). The inmates struggle throughout the book to have a say in their own lives, for example, a standoff that blows up between the nurse and the men over watching the baseball game on TV.

The tragic hero of the book is Randal Patrick McMurphy, who starts out as an entertaining big-mouthed rascal, a flagrant counterpoint who’s boldness gives him very much of a voice, and whose masculinity is fully intact. His gleeful, ever-escalating contest with nurse Ratched and his rebellion against the oppressive norms of the ward holds out possibility of victory and deliverance for the men. He is a sort of Christ-figure at the end, bringing transformation in the inmates before getting lobotomized by doctors and euthanized by the Chief.

There are many sublime moments in the book beyond the day-to-day life in the ward, known as “The Combine.” Chief Bromden’s vision of the dog running around in the field at night and the subsequent vision of the dog killed by a car mirroring McMurphy’s fate is stunning. His memories of life on the reservation as a youth, and the whole fishing expedition with McMurphy and 12 friends are favorite breaks from life in the Combine.