Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society by Lauren Goodlad

This book argues that many of the contradictions on topics such as social welfare, poverty, and the government's ideal role in society inherent in Victorian viewpoints come from the fact that "Victorian Britain was a liberal society"--and that this liberalism cut in two ways to both promote freedom and to insist on state aid as a means of achieving social health (vii). While Goodlad sees a Foucauldian perspective as useful in untangling the different strains of thought in Victorian Society, she finds later Foucault more useful than the genealogical approach of Discipline and Punish. Many of Goodlad's readings focus on pastorship--that is, someone (usually middle class) guiding the poor to better character and better living. She reads Dickens (Oliver Twist, Bleak House, and Our Mutual Friend), Frances Trollope, Anthony Trollope, George Gissing, and H.G. Wells among others. These readings arrive in conjunction with a careful social history: Goodlad does a nice job of showing the relationship between the literature, its authors' opinions, and the culture in which it was produced. I found her reading of the educational system in Our Mutual Friend particularly helpful. While this book is out of my field (and out of my usual mode of theoretical approach), I found its argument to be cogent and reasonably well supported.

The King's Speech: How One Man Saved the British Monarchy by Mark Logue and Peter Conradi

I enjoyed this book, although I think the movie made a more compelling narrative. The book seems to be written as an attempt to capitalize on the interest generated by the movie. It uses both Logue's diaries and records and a variety of other sources to tell the story from the side of both George VI and Lionel Logue. While I think the claim that Logue saved the monarchy overstated (and indeed, the movie and the book both seem to exaggerate his friendship with George VI in different ways), the book gives a nice portrait of Britain and its king.

Change We Can Believe In by Barack Obama

As I understand it, this book was actually put together by Obama's staffers during the campaign, in order to present his platform to the American people. It's organized into two parts: first, his platform (which is divided in such a way as to allow him to repeat key themes throughout the first section), and second, copies of various speeches he's given. The writing in the first part is nothing to write home about, but it was intriguing to compare his campaign promises (to be fair, promises that he couldn't possibly fulfill, given the fact that he has to work with Congress to get any law passed) to what he's accomplished in office. The speeches are more intriguing; I'm convinced that President Obama is a good writer on the basis of his books, and he's obviously hired great speechwriters, who take advantage of his charisma and oratorical talent. The speeches are usefully repetitive and rhythmic, although they don't say a lot (the meat of his plans is in the first part of the book). This book is a strange hybrid, but worth looking into.

A briefe Relation of the Discovery and Plantation of New England by Sir Ferdinando Gorges

In this account Sir Ferdinando Gorges offers three types of observations about the settlement of New England. He starts with a history of settlement (which actually reads a lot like the sixth part of John Smith's Generall Historie) and then gives a part on the natural resources of the land (to encourage further settlement), and unique to a lot of the early English accounts of the settlement of North America, a theoretical explanation of the government practiced in the colony.