On Our Minds in 2017: Getting Personal
As we at To the Best of Our Knowledge start off a new year, we wanted to talk about some of the books, movies, music, games and other media that we think might play a role in shaping the ideas that find their way onto the show in 2017. Since that list was massive, we’ve chopped it up into a few core themes that emerged from our collective media diet.
History is often best understood through the lens of the intensely personal. If 2016 was a year without historical precedent, it makes us wonder what figures could make it more intimate and knowable when its stories are written. Until then, we’re all attempting to learn more about distant and modern history by knowing the figures that made that history, from Queen Victoria to Wavy Gravy to Elon Musk.
Julia Baird, “Victoria: The Queen”
Julia Baird’s biography of Queen Victoria had me from the first sentence:
When Victoria first sat on the throne, her feet didn’t touch the floor.
She was 18 years old and less than five feet tall. As queen of the British Empire, she would rule a quarter of the world’s people for the better part of a century — at a time when women were supposed to be submissive, supportive and subservient. We tend to remember her as the girl queen helplessly in love with her husband, Prince Albert — or as the grieving widow shrouded in black. But Queen Victoria survived eight assassination attempts, raised nine children, and advised, fought with and fired 10 prime ministers. She was a strong, resilient woman who fought for power at a time when women had none. Sound familiar?
I picked this up in the wake of the election, as I was thinking about Hillary Clinton — another woman with the strength and aspiration to lead an empire — and about her failed bid for the highest office. The book is surprisingly relevant, both politically and personally.
Victoria grappled with many of the matters women do today — managing uneven relationships, placating resentful spouses, trying to raise decent children, battling bouts of insecurity and depression, spending years recovering from childbirth, yearning for a lost love, sinking into the strength of another when we want to hide from the world, longing to make independent decisions about our own life and to shape the world we live in.
In other words — she ruled the greatest empire in the world, and she was just like us. Makes you want a scepter and crown of your own.
— Anne Strainchamps
Alison Weir, “Katherine of Aragon: The True Queen”
Since I’m on a British history riff here, I also want to mention historian Alison Weir’s compulsively readable novel, “Katherine of Aragon: The True Queen,” which came out this past summer. There’s an old rhyme, probably invented to help schoolchildren remember their history, that goes “King Henry the Eight to six wives he was wedded; one died, one survived, two divorced, two beheaded.” Katherine of Aragon was Henry’s first wife, the one he divorced in order to marry Anne Boleyn, thereby severing England from the Catholic church and jump-starting nearly a century of religious persecution.
Weir brings her to life as a young Spanish princess (daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella) sent to cold, damp England to marry the heir to the crown — Henry’s consumptive older brother. When the bridegroom proves too ill to consummate the marriage and conveniently dies shortly thereafter, Katherine is held hostage while England and Spain argue about who gets her dowry. With subterfuge and sheer persistence, she rescues herself and eventually wins King Henry and the British crown. As a historian, Alison Weir has spent decades reading the household accounts and private correspondence of much of Tudor England, but as a novelist, she lets herself inhabit her characters’ minds and emotions in a way that will make you wish more history could be taught as truthful fiction.
— Anne Strainchamps
Bob Dylan as read by Sean Penn, “Chronicles Volume One”
In 2016, Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature, which surprised more than a few people, including Dylan himself.
My reaction? I don’t actually know that much about Bob Dylan. I figured his recent autobiography, “Chronicles Volume One,” was the place to start.
I immediately jumped into the audiobook version when I saw that it was read by Sean Penn. The reviews of Penn’s audio version range from “captivating” to “perfect.” I’m leading into the new year by listening to Dylan’s life.
— Charles Monroe-Kane
Marina Abramovic, “Walk Through Walls”
Abramovic is one of the world’s most remarkable artists — I found her memoir riveting. It recounts her youthful rebellion against the cultural repression in communist Yugoslavia and her early, incredibly daring performance pieces, which incorporated knives, fire and even a gun into her art. She describes pain as “a transcendent experience.” Her lifelong goal has been to remove the barrier between artist and audience, which gives her art tremendous immediacy. And Marina’s account of the months that she and her partner, Ulay, lived with Australian Aborigines is an unforgettable story in itself.
— Steve Paulson
“Lo And Behold: Reveries of the Connected World”
2016 seemed a year where many arguably frivolous technologies — Twitter, mobile, live video broadcasts, email server preferences — gained massive social, political and cultural importance. That’s not likely to change in the following years, so now is the perfect time for Werner Herzog’s introspective “Lo and Behold,” a documentary that pokes at many notions about the universal force of good that rapid technological change has brought to our world. Herzog probes deeply into what it means to live in a world that is rapidly changing and always connected.
There are some subjects he cannot help but to spar with a bit — he hilariously deflates the techno-optimism of inventor, billionaire and real-life Tony Stark Elon Musk at every opportunity — but he also speaks to those whose feelings on the power of internet connectivity as a cultural force varies from irrepressibly sunny to darkly depressed. Notably, a mother from a family devastated by online bullying calls out the internet as “a manifestation of evil itself.” I remain more optimistic than that about the power of online conversation personally, but the film raises important questions about how we use the internet as a tool and how we might take stock of the good versus the evil it can manifest in our lives.
— Mark Riechers
Larry Brilliant, “Sometimes Brilliant”
In another memoir, Brilliant traces the arc of a fascinating life. Larry was a brooding kid from the Midwest whose life was transformed after meeting Martin Luther King, Jr. He became a Civil Rights activist and also got a medical degree. Then he met Wavy Gravy, the clown prince of the Sixties, and joined Wavy’s Hog Farm bus trip across Europe and Asia. Eventually, this hippie doctor landed in an Indian ashram, had a transformative (and magical) encounter with the guru Neem Karoli Baba, and through a remarkable series of events, joined a U.N. team of doctors that helped eradicate smallpox.
— Steve Paulson
