'To Keep the Luggage as Light as Possible'

A pleasing generational reciprocity has been happening in my family. I’ve always made sure my sons could get their hands on any books they wanted. That meant frequent trips to libraries and bookstores, and wide-open borrowing privileges from the shelves at home. If they wanted a book, they could have it. As a kid I hated being told a book was “beyond your reading level.” I remember my middle son when he was about three years old repeatedly borrowing a volume from the public library in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.: Eurotunnel, a children’s book about the tunnel beneath the English Channel. When he had to return it, I would take him to the library the following day and he would run to the children’s room in the basement, to the place where Eurotunnel had been reshelved, and clutch it to his chest, almost weeping with relief.

That same son is now a third-year midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy. On Wednesday he texted me to say he had just finished reading The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter That Transformed the Middle East (2004; rev. ed. 2017) by Abraham Rabinovich. Michael called it “one of the best military history books I’ve ever read.” I trust his judgment and ordered it that same evening. It arrived on Saturday and I stayed up late reading it. Rabinovich possesses the journalist’s chief virtue: dogged research. He also writes well, without filigree or sermonizing, and knows how to keep the story moving along. I remember following the war closely, from Oct. 6 to 25, 1973, afraid it might mean the end of civilization in the Middle East and another triumph for the Soviet Union. The final cease-fire was called one day before I turned twenty-one.

It’s a relief to know I can rely on Michael’s literary judgment. I’m reminded of John Ruskin’s father in the 1830’s packing his son’s luggage for an overseas journey and including four volumes of Dr. Johnson’s Idler and Rambler essays. In his weird and endearing memoir Praeterita (1886-89), Ruskin writes:

“On our foreign journeys, it being of course desirable to keep the luggage as light as possible, my father had judged that four little volumes of Johnson – the Idler and the Rambler – did, under names wholly appropriate to the circumstances, contain more substantial literary nourishment than could be, from any other author, packed into so portable a compass.”

My parents could read but didn’t. That may lie behind the satisfaction I feel from supplying my sons with books and being supplied in turn. Ruskin writes:

“. . . Johnson was the one author accessible to me. No other writer could have secured me, as he did, against all chance of being misled by my own sanguine and metaphysical temperament. He taught me carefully to measure life, and distrust fortune. . .”