A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order
(Basic, $30)
That alphabetization was once a controversial practice “may seem bizarre to a modern reader,” said Chris Allnut in the Financial Times. But the alphabet is a powerful social instrument. When kids recite their ABCs, they are committing to memory the building blocks of a writing system that was uniquely democratizing when it arose 4,000 years ago in western Egypt. Being literate previously required memorizing thousands of hieroglyphs; the new system required knowing just 20 or 30. Many centuries would pass, however, before alphabetization become a normal way to organize data. Using an arbitrary sorting system ran counter to how people understood their world. Some things in life were more important than others, after all. If you were a 13th-century monk, author Judith Flanders writes, “alphabetical order looked like rebellion against the order of divine creation.”
“The quantity of detail she piles on the reader is overwhelming,” said Katherine Powers in The Wall Street Journal. But that doesn’t negate the book’s one “truly revelatory” dimension: “the way the alphabet facilitated the change from a worldview that saw reality as having intrinsic meaning, with hierarchy as its underlying organizing principle, to one that was essentially nominalist, with the human mind inventing tools for organizing it usefully.” The Great Library of Alexandria, Flanders tells us, dabbled in alphabetization. But in Europe, libraries for centuries held so few books
by Alexis de Tocqueville (1835). The man who coined the term “individualism,” Tocqueville was perhaps the first observer to describe America’s unique blend of liberty and equality, achieved through what he called “self-interest, rightly understood.” Required reading for aspiring communitarians.
Democracy in America
by Walter Lippmann (1914). At a critical historical moment when the nation was drifting down an ever-darkening path, the 25-year-old Lippmann called on citizens to repudiate fatalism and embrace their role as agents of change. His book reads like a voice from the past exhorting today’s youth to master the future of our democracy.
Drift and Mastery
by Louise Knight (2005). Citizen is a compelling biography of one of the most famous drivers of America’s last upswing, Jane Addams. It illuminates her transformation from melancholy schoolgirl to intrepid social entrepreneur to powerful social justice activist. Addams was one of many reformers who helped turn Americans back toward each other and a shared understanding of the common good.
Citizen
by Isabel Wilkerson (2010). This masterful chronicle of the Great Migration tells how millions of black Americans, their hopes dashed after Reconstruction, left the South for what looked like a brighter future in the North. It’s an inspiring story of black Americans’ persistent faith in the promise of the American “we,” and their willingness to stand up and claim their place in it—essentially against all odds.
The Warmth of Other Suns
by Bruce Schulman (2001). For much of the 20th century, America was building an ever more “we” society. But in the late 1960s, that trend reversed and we made a sharp turn toward “I.” Schulman’s engaging history brings to life the crises—political, social, economic, and cultural—that set us on a path toward the hyperindividualism we’re experiencing today.
The Seventies
by Robert Reich (2018). This slim volume is a clear-eyed manifesto reminding Americans of what is possible when we commit to cooperation. As Teddy Roosevelt once said, “The fundamental rule of our national life is that, on the whole and in the long run, we shall go up or down together.”
The Common Good