Tuesday, May 5, 2009

This is how history should be taught....

I've been reading Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke, an insightful chronicle of events leading up to WWII (a Kindle book). This is how history should be taught. In school, you study American history and World history and very rarely do they mesh. In reading Human Smoke one gets a true sense of how the world fit together at that time and how what happens in one arena influences another. Maybe this is the luxury of reading as a grown up, but one has to wonder how the world would be if we studied on a more global basis throughout school.

In thinking about WWII, it always puzzles me how we, as human beings, could let things get so out of control. How could humans do such horrible things to one another? How can we let things like this continue today in places like Darfur? It is a mystery of the world that I'm sure will never be answered.

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