Review: LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME (+Friday56 LinkUp)

Title: Lies My Teacher Told  Me: Everything Your American History Textbooks Got Wrong: A Graphic Adaptation by James W. Loewen and Nate Powell

Summary: In the 1990s James W. Loewen, an American History Professor, published Lies My Teacher Told Me. It was highly regarded, winning both praise and awards. Now in this edition, published in 2024, Loewen has partnered with graphic artist Nate Powell to bring the original back to life with updated information and fantastic illustrations.

Using several American History textbooks currently in use as his examples, Loewen points out why American students are so bored by the subject and find nothing within these textbooks to inform their current situations. Dividing the book into twelve themed chapters he makes a case for truth and honesty about our past and giving students the tools to examine our past to inform our futures.

With the help of one illustration per chapter I shall attempt to summarize the book. Obviously this is just a tiny piece of the book and I encourage you to read it for yourself.

The introduction is very uncomplimentary to the teaching of US history. "History is the only field in which the more courses students take the stupider they become." Ouch. Yet, of all subjects it is the most dependent on textbooks.

 

Ch. 1, American Heroes -- Loewen starts off with a bang. He talks about how we make people into heroes (Betsy Ross, Rosa Parks, Helen Keller) without teaching anything about these individuals and what they actually did to deserve our attention. I proved his point when I had a conversation with an adult not long ago and ask why was Helen Keller an American Hero. The person replied "because she was deaf and blind yet she learned to read and write." That is all we know about her. Not that she was a remarkable person concerned about inequality and how impoverished persons did not have access to health care and other services she had at her avail. She spoke out and wrote about these types of issues. 

Ch. 2, The True Importance of Christopher Columbus -- Up until recently we have made Columbus a hero by saying he discovered America. This idea completely discounts Indigenous people that lived here. It also makes him into a hero even though he was very ruthless in his approach to these people. When we removed Columbus Day or renamed it to Indigenous People's Day many celebrated, but some insist of that Columbus is a hero.

Ch. 3, The First Thanksgiving. We like to think that colonists and Indigenous folks held hands and enjoyed peace right from the start. Unfortunately this is far from the truth.

Ch. 4, Read Eyes -- Deciding who is civilized and who is not based on a Euro-Centric notion. "What we have done to the peoples who were living in North America is our ORIGNIAL SIN." -Sol Tax, anthropologist.

Ch 5, The Invisibility of Racism in textbooks -- This amounts to early forms of anti-woke publishing. Because something is bad, will make people feel uncomfortable, or controversial, leave it out. Ch 6, John Brown and Abraham Lincoln -- John Brown, a white man who was killed for trying to save slaves has gone through a revisionist history. He is portrayed a mentally ill in the textbooks rather than a man who was very concerned about the way slavery considered Black people as subhuman. Don't like something a person does or says? They must be crazy.

Ch. 7, the Land of Opportunity for some -- Though we tell each other we are a classless society that is not true. "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons -- a very much larger class of necessity in every society -- to forego the privilege of liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific manual tasks." Woodrow Wilson. Oh boy, are we ever living through this today with Trump politics.

Ch. 8, What the Federal Government is doing and has done -- We hold ourselves up as good paragons of justice in the world, yet reading the above examples, one has to wonder. "As long as you are convinced you have ever done anything, you can never do anything." - Malcolm X. Think about the way we recently bombed Iran. For what?

Ch. 9, The Vietnam War -- Most textbooks spend about as much coverage of the Vietnam War as they do covering the War of 1812. Why? Because we didn't win this war so we can't tell ourselves we were heroes?

Ch. 10, Ignoring the recent past -- What can be learned by studying the Civil Rights Movement, 9-11, the War in Iraq, climate change, pandemics, or the impact of A.I? A ton!

Ch. 11, History and the future -- Shouldn't we study the past to help inform our future? That isn't what most textbooks do.

Ch. 12, Does this way of teaching work? Imagine being a student today and getting a hold of this book in your school library. You read it as your teacher is following the curriculum as set by the textbook. Wouldn't you be angry as you notice the book skips climate change, says next-to nothing about the Black Lives Matter movement, glorifies Betsy Ross who really didn't make the American flag, downplays George Washing and Thomas Jefferson's owning of slave, etc.?

Afterward: Honestly, don't we want a citizenry that knows how to learn and to think for themselves. Shouldn't that be the goal of education?

Review: "Every teacher, every student of history, every citizen should red this book." - Howard Zinn. I feel the same way. Unfortunately, the book is also quite overwhelming. Most of the points I was aware of, but not all. I had a really terrible experience in high school and didn't even take an American history class, somehow escaping it in the experimental 1970s. So I didn't realize to what extent information was altered or left out of textbooks. I knew Christopher Columbus wasn't a hero, yet I hadn't realized what a tyrant he was, for example. As I read each chapter I found myself angry and angrier so I had to read slowly and take breaks. I even had to skim some of the chapters just to save my sanity. I've been working on this book almost all summer. But I finished and I still want everyone to read it. My rating of 4 stars reflects the value of the book and how difficult I found it digest.

__________________________________________________________

Sign up for The Friday56 on the Inlinkz below. 

RULES:

*Grab a book, any book

*Turn to page 56 or 56% in your e-reader (If you want to improvise, go ahead!)

*Find a snippet, but no spoilers!

*Post it to your blog and add your url to the Linky below. If you do not add the specific url for your post, we may miss it! 

*Visit other blogs and leave comments about their snippets. Expand the community. Please leave a comment for me, too!  

Also visit Book Beginnings on Friday hosted by Rose City Reader and First Line Friday hosted by Reading is My Super Power to share the beginning quote from your book.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

-Anne

TTT: Book series I'd like to catch up on

Top Ten Tuesday: Book series I'd like to catch up on

1. The Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante
I've read the first two books and purchased the third and fourth. This is high on my list of series to finish.

2. The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
My hubby and I listened to the first book and my mother gave me the second book in the series. I hope to read on and finish this series before year's end.

3. The Harlem Trilogy by Colson Whitehead
The third book just came out but I haven't read the second book yet. My husband liked the first book very much so we may try to listen to the last two books this fall as we drive to Eugene for football games.

4. The Amgash series by Elizabeth Strout
I read four of these books out of order (1,4,3,5) all I have left is #2, Anything is Possible, which seems like an an appropriate title for this project.

5. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy by Douglas Adams
The funniest book ever written has a joke for its readers -- a trilogy is made up of five books! I still haven't read the fifth book, Mostly Harmless. When I need something very lighthearted I will seek this one out.

6. Discworld series by Terry Pratchett
There are 41 novels in this series. I've read the first and the last and maybe six or seven in between. I want to keep reading but get overwhelmed at the enormity of the task. Which book to read next? What are your favorites from the series?

7. The Cemetery of Forgotten Books series by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I've read and loved The Shadow of the Wind #1 in the series. I've read The City of Mist, #5. I own The Angel Game, #2. I at least want to read that book.

That's all I can think of at the moment

-Anne

Sunday Salon -- August 16, 2026

 

Sorority Sisters: Anne Marie, Me, Mary Ann, Chris, Sandy

Weather: Lovely summer weather with tinges of odors of forest fire smoke every once in a while.😕

Sisterhood: I met with four of my sorority sisters for a good chat and dinner early last week at Anne Marie's home. It was amazing how we could all pick up where we left off forty-five years ago. Sisters forever.

Ian and his Auntie wearing silly rally "hats" trying to urge team onto victory. (It didn't work.)

First Mariners baseball game: Ian went to his major league baseball game in Seattle last Friday to be part of the crowd celebrating the 50th season of the Mariners team. He almost caught a flyball, ate pizza, bought a baseball from the club store, and got to watch a home run derby after the game was over which involved eight retired Mariners, including Ichiro! After riding the link train back to the park-n-ride and driving home we didn't get back until 1 AM. Pretty late for all of us but especially for an eight-year-old boy.

Slow-mo: Since getting back from Oregon two weeks ago I've been pretty much on slow-mo. The only things I've had to do is go to appointments and then the rest of the days have been filled in with reading, blogging, and watching TV. We are finally caught up on back episode of Ninja Warrior and AGT. The above video is of our dog and his is reaction to a dog trick on AGT. The rest of the time he was ignoring the TV.

Reading (since my last update):

• Completed:
• 
  
  
  
  
• Currently reading: 
• 
  
  
  
  
• Blogging:

• TTT: Inspiring Books with Uninspiring Covers
• Review: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
• Six-Degrees: LAND
• Classics Club Spin #45, announcement is Sunday (today)
• TTT: Books I was reading on this day for the past ten years
• Review: Land by Maggie O'Farrell
• Reviews: The Warmth of Other Suns and Last Summer on State Street

Cybils Book Award closes: Sadly I read that the Cybils (Children's and Young Adult Book Lovers' Literary Awards) Board decided that it was time to cease to exist. I was a Cybils judge for several years --mostly reading MG and YA nonfiction, and I loved it and took a lot of pride in doing it. The board cited among two reasons that it was time to fold. First that is difficult to find dedicated judges and secondly they had trouble getting preview copies from publishers. I understand the first reason. There were so many categories when one factors in all the category classifications from pre-readers up to high school. I bet it was tough to fill all the judging slots. The second reason, one would think that publishers would want people to read and review their books but I bet it was a huge job to ask them to send preview copies to each of the judges for their books. Sigh. I wasn't a board member so I can't even begin to understand the task that those folks, probably volunteers, went through each year to pull off the awards. But I always thought the process was more open than it should have been: Publishers didn't have a limit on how many books they could submit and nominations by members were accepted for books not even read by the nominators. Because of this some categories, like YA fiction, would end up with over 150 titles included. What judge has the time to run down and read that many books in the 2 month time frame? Goodbye Cybils! I will miss you.

OMG: I had a dickens of time this week adding images (photos) to the post. The two photos were texted to me from others' phones. When I sent to them to my computer I couldn't add them to the post because they had a .heic file type instead of .jpg. I tried and tried to save them in the other format. Eventually my husband had to download a converter app onto my computer so I could change them into a usable format. Grr. Just when I get used to dealing with the technology at hand, I have to learn something new. Why do tech companies do that?

This week's solar eclipse over Spain:

Juan Carlos Muño
Time-lapse pic by Juan Carlos Muñoz, astronomer, science communicator and media officer at ESO. Photographed from Peñafiel in the north of Spain. https://fosstodon.org/@astro_jcm@mastodon.online/117094881754294266

-Anne

Reading books that make me feel uncomfortable for all the right reasons

I've been grappling with the criticism in some circles that being "woke" is undesirable. Why would any educated person think it's a bad idea to be aware of what others go through on a daily basis? Why is it "woke" to read about what happened to others [POC, women, children, Indigenous people ... fill in the blank] in history books or for those history textbooks to correct misinformation as new information comes to light? I've come to a recent observation that the critique comes from people who don't want to put in the work to learn about unpleasant and uncomfortable truths. 

Don and I recently finished the Pulitzer Prize winning nonfiction book by Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, which examines the great migration out of southern states when six million Black Americans left their homes for locations in the North and West starting in 1915 and continuing until 1970. The book is organized around the lives of three of these migrants: Ida Mae Gladney, a sharecropper's wife, who fled Mississippi for Chicago in 1937; George Starling, who had to leave Florida for Harlem in 1945 in fear for his life; and Robert Foster, a surgeon who left Louisiana in 1953 in hopes of being able to use all of his medical skills in California. 

The book, published in 2010, clearly took Wilkerson years to compile. She conducted a series of extensive interviews with the three protagonists over many years so she was able to give readers a very complete profile of their lives before, during, and after they migrated. By focusing on three individual stories Wilkerson was able to show aspects of life in the South which led to the need/desire to move and the migration routes which generally followed train lines. After conducting over 1000 interviews and doing a deep dive into a broad swath of research on the migration, Wilkerson was able to dispel the many misconceptions that transplanted Blacks were more uncouth, ignorant, and impoverished than the Black people who were already in the northern cities. Extensive scholarship shows them to be more like immigrants from Europe, who arrived in the new land ready to work hard, improve their economic conditions, and ready to assimilate into their new land.

The Warmth of Other Suns wasn't an easy book to read, both Don and I agreed. The stories of terrible inequality and unfair treatment of Blacks, where ever they lived, was depressing and maddening. Typically we can listen to hours of audiobooks on long car trips without pausing. Not so with this book. The stories kept hitting us like gut punches and we would have to take breaks from listening as we digested the new information. Fortunately we were together so we could stop and talk to work through our feelings. It was hard work but we were learning and waking up. It took us over a month of listening, an hour here, an hour there for a total of 22+ hours. When we finished we both were very glad we read the book, but relieved we were done. I rated the book with 4 stars for the above reasons. Don rated the book with 4 stars for its content and 3 stars for entertainment value. Like I said, it was hard work reading this book and most people want to enjoy what they read. Isn't that fair?

A week after we finished The Warmth of Other Suns I found myself reading Last Summer on State Street by Toya Wolfe, as part of the Goodreads Summer Challenge. It is set in the South Side of Chicago in the late 1990s during the process of dismantling the housing projects built to accommodate many of the migrant Blacks who made their way to the city in the 1930s and 40s. By the 90s people living in these projects found themselves crammed together in inhospitable conditions, beset by the crack-cocaine epidemic, and overrun by rival gangs. The story is told by a 12-year-old girl who loses all her friends, and nearly loses her brother, in this one fateful summer. It is a heartbreaking story, though the girl makes it out of the projects with help from a special teacher and her church. But like the previous book, I found reading Last Summer on State Street was hard work. It gave me an updated look at other effects of the Great Migration, too. 

I am never upset when I learn something new from a book, even if I find it difficult to read. My discomfort is, after all, helping me to become more "woke" and hopefully a better antiracist. My rating of this book was 4 stars.

Challenges: 20 books of Summer (#26 & #27); Big Book Summer (640 pages); Audiobooks with Don; and Goodreads Summer Challenge (11/11).

-Anne

Review: LAND (+Friday56 LinkUp)

Title: Land by Maggie O'Farrell

Book beginning/First Line Friday quote: 

His father was ever the man of a few words. Even when Liam is on the other side of the world, with a new name unfamiliar clothes, facing a committee of robed men who have come to sit in judgement of him, he will be able to recall the astonishing day that turned his father garrulous.

Friday56 quote: 

Tomás will not repent. He has nothing to repent for: he is as certain of this as he is of his own name, as he is of the orientation of magnetic north.

Summary:

On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. Tomás, however, is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster.

The British soldiers in charge are due to arrive any day, expecting the work to be completed, but Tomás is sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse of trees. His life, and those of his family, will never be the same again. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What was it that caused such cracks to open in Tomás and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping, and get them both home?

Land is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away. (Publisher)

Review:

O'Farrell, author of Hamnet, opens her latest book with the above epigraph -- the definition of the Irish word "seanchaí". It seems to me that the author has assigned herself as the custodian of tradition and a reciter of ancient lore in her book Land. And it may explain the way that the story often uses fable-like elements even when the majority of it is very realistic. Though the story uses the omniscient 3rd person style, sometimes the point of view shifts from its human characters to dogs, the house, the land, even an unborn baby. The land looks back into prehistory and then later it zooms the story forward way past the lives of the characters in Tomás' family. these time shifts are a bit confusing.

The book begins with Liam, the oldest son in the family, looking back on the day when everything shifted for him and his family...the day his father stepped into a magical copse of trees and drank from a well he found there. This well seemed to have magical abilities and creatures one might expect to find in Celtic mythology. When Tomás, an Irishman, emerged from the forest he was a changed man, one determined to no longer work for the English by making their maps for them. But his mapmaking was how Tomás supported his family: Phina, the mother, Liam his son, daughters Enda and Rose, and an unborn son Eugene. Ultimately the episode in the copse also led Tomás to sell everything and move his family, against their wishes, out of Dublin to the lonely plot of land near the special, magical forest.

The scene from the Friday56 quote is during an attempted exorcism by a Catholic priest on Tomás. It is the first of a lifetime of disasters which befall the family, perhaps as a way to highlight Ireland's dismal history. Fortunately the book ends on a sweet, positive note, otherwise I'd say a lot of the story is very dark.

I thought the writing was beautiful and would often find myself swept up in the epic story. I also found it a tremendously hard book to read very fast. I just poked along for over a month making little progress even though I was listening to the audiobook. That is the second week in a row where I've confessed to my slow reading. Maybe it is me, not the books? My rating: 4 stars.

At 400 pages, this qualifies for Big Book Summer Challenge

__________________________________________________________

Sign up for The Friday56 on the Inlinkz below. 

RULES:

*Grab a book, any book

*Turn to page 56 or 56% in your e-reader (If you want to improvise, go ahead!)

*Find a snippet, but no spoilers!

*Post it to your blog and add your url to the Linky below. If you do not add the specific url for your post, we may miss it! 

*Visit other blogs and leave comments about their snippets. Expand the community. Please leave a comment for me, too!  

Also visit Book Beginnings on Friday hosted by Rose City Reader and First Line Friday hosted by Reading is My Super Power to share the beginning quote from your book.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

.

-Anne

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.” —Oscar Wilde

TTT: Books I Was Reading On This Day Over the Last Ten Years

Top Ten Tuesday: 

Books I Was Reading On This Day, August 11th, Over the Last Ten Years 

This was fun. And I think looking at these ten+ books, you see what kind of reader I am -- an omnivore.

2026 currently listening to: Country People by Daniel Mason (Audio, contemporary, 19% complete)

2026 currently reading: Last Summer on State Street by Toya Wolfe (Print, Contemporary, 81% complete)

2025: The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (Audio; Literary fiction)

2025: When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi (Print; Sci-Fi)

2024: Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn (Mystery, thriller)

2023: The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler (Contemporary when it was published in the 1980s)

2022: The Heart of American Poetry by Edward Hirsh (Print; Poetry analysis)

2022: Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus (Audio; Historical fiction)

2021: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (Sci-Fi)

2020: Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King (Mystery / thriller)

2019: On the Come Up by Angie Thomas (YA Contemporary)

2018: Ordinary, Extraordinary Jane Austen by Deborah Hopkinson (Children's Lit. / Biography, illustrated)

2017: The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems by Billy Collins (Poetry)

2016: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (Classic)

Note, I selected two books for 2025 and 2022 because I finished them on approximately the same day, August 11th on their year.

-Anne