I’ve been doing a lot of reading in the last two or three months. Whenever I’m looking at a period of inactivity, I start shopping for books. When in Nashville in April and May, I went to a Barnes and Noble store just off the Vanderbilt campus. In such bookstores I just drift around the place looking for likely titles, which usually end up being histories. I buy more than I’m likely to read, because I know that about half will not prove out. But I also find good ones in my stack of books, and this time I found a real gem, a book by David Halberstam called “The Children.” (Amazon.com is also a good source sometimes – on occasion they even send me a personalized email, saying that a recent book has been published that I might be interested in, given my purchasing pattern. The last “personalized” message they sent recommended a book about Tom Horn written by an obscure lawyer from Worland, Wyoming.)

Halberstam is a big name in non-fiction. A friend of mine in a position to know said Halberstam’s manuscripts were printed as they were submitted; that is, without copy editing. That seems right, because although he’s very good, in many of his books I’ve found obvious errors that a good copy editor would have caught. Still, Halberstam delivers. He won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, a Norman Mailer prize for Distinguished Journalism, and it seems like every book he wrote became a number one best seller on the New York Times Best Sellers list. His best known book was “The Best and the Brightest,” which I read and thought was a tour de force.

“The Children” is about a group of college students attending schools in Nashville in the early 1960s. One of the things Halberstam understands very well is that the key to good non-fiction is to make readers care about your subjects (David McCullough understands this very well, too). And, boy, does Halberstam have a fascinating cast of characters to work with here. Some we all heard about later, such as Andrew Young, John Lewis, and, of course, Martin Luther King, but there are other extraordinary people Halberstam wrote about, such as Diane Nash, Jim Bevel and Jim Lawson, about whom I’d never heard. These people decided it was time to de-segregate the lunch counters in Nashville, and they set out to do out. It took an enormous amount of courage and deep faith, but they persevered. The whole series of events makes for an inspiring story, finally leading to the Civil Rights act of 1964 and the Voting Rights act of 1965.

I also picked up a book by Dick Cheney, with his daughter, Liz: “In My Time.” I wouldn’t normally have done that, because Cheney’s politics and mine are not the same, but David McCullough mentioned this book as one of the best non-fiction works in recent years. Besides, I’ve admired Cheney, thinking of him as a fellow Wyoming boy, one who made very good. And once I spent a half hour talking to his delightful wife, Lynn, about John Madison: I thought that any man married to such a woman must really have something going. Anyway, I’m glad I read his book. Yes, there were portions of the book that made me uneasy, because I just didn’t agree with some of the policy positions Cheney took, but he was, by and large, even-handed, and he provided a first row seat to monumental historical events.

The last book I’ll talk about is “The Princess Bride,” by William Goldman, a man with a fabulous resume as a playwright. My daughter sent it to me; she and I had agreed that some books not considered adult had great merit. This book is one of those. Though presented as a fairy tale, Goldman’s work is more than that. I’m sure it has had a strong appeal to adults (did for this adult), but it’s not because the themes are “mature,” using that word in a salacious sense, but because they are “mature,” since they’re presented in such a charming and wise way. The book is about a perfect princess who is rescued by a perfect lover. Sounds old hat, but not the way Goldman presents it. Even as a reader sees the characters as silly, he grows to really care about what the author does with them. Odd book, but very satisfying.

John Davis was raised in Worland, graduating from W. H. S. in 1961. John began practicing law here in 1973 and is mostly retired. He is the author of several books.