Month: December 2022

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The Year in a Traveler’s Life – 2022

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David and the Lion - TanzaniaSome followers will recall that my annual travel roundup has been called “The Year in Science Traveling” since its inception many years ago. I’ve decided to change it to “The Year in a Traveler’s Life” from this point forward to reflect my broader traveling experiences. Given my writing history, which I’ll capture shortly in my “writer’s life” annual post, much of my travel includes Lincoln-themed locations. That said, I still do a lot of science traveling and this year was no exception. In fact, it was almost a normal travel year after two-plus years of COVID travel restrictions. In 2022 I made my first overseas trips since I went to Cuba in May of 2019. It was nice to see more of the world again.

The travel year didn’t start well. We had planned a small ship cruise beginning and ending in Istanbul, Turkey. It would have taken us into the Black Sea with stops in Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine (Odesa), Russia (Sochi), Georgia, and a few additional spots in Turkey (including Cappadocia). Although it was scheduled for September, by March it was clear that was not going to happen. Not surprisingly, the cruise was cancelled soon after Russia invaded Ukraine and our attention switched to focusing on supporting a Ukrainian friend with whom we had traveled previously. With the Black Sea off the table, we looked for alternatives and found a quick booking for a tour of Iceland, a place that has been on my bucket list for many years. Iceland was a wonderful experience as we circled the island, stopping at a seemingly infinite number of spectacular waterfalls. We also saw volcanoes, luckily all dormant at the moment. Not long after getting home there was a volcano spewing ash and lava not far from the airport we had traveled from. While there I saw the Eyjafjallajökull volcano that had disrupted air travel for weeks in 2010 while I was living in Brussels. Iceland is known as the land of fire and ice, and this trip certainly proved that catchphrase true. A truly amazing experience, including hiking behind a large waterfall (and getting drenched) and seeing the Mid-Atlantic Ridge that passes through the island.

Meanwhile, around the time of our Iceland trip we committed to a photo safari in Tanzania, which we took in late November into early December. This was our first time in Africa, our sixth continent (still working on getting to Antarctica). The trip came about through a friend we’ve traveled with two times before. I had met her in 2013 when my first Tesla book was coming out (we were both involved with the Tesla Science Foundation and her mother is from Serbia, like Tesla). Since then, we’ve joined her and her travel organization, EuroCircle, on two trips. The first took us to Serbia, Montenegro, and Croatia, one of the highlights of which was meeting the Prince and Princess of Serbia in the Royal Palace. The second was to Australia and New Zealand. This time we flew for over 13 hours to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, then another 2.5 hours to Arusha, Tanzania. After a night in a small hotel outside the city, we spent the following week in the bush, living in different tented lodges each night (including the one where giraffes and wildebeests snorted and roamed outside our tent all night). We saw thousands of animals – elephants, lions, wildebeest, buffalo, zebras, antelopes, cheetahs, leopards, and tons of bird species – as we wandered through three national parks (Tarangire, Serengeti, Mt. Kilimanjaro) and the Ngorongoro Crater Conservation Area, plus the rift valley. We even did some sunrise ballooning over the Serengeti. I’ll have more stories and photos as I get the time to sort through them.

Besides the two overseas trips, we made two road trips up to New England. The first in June was to celebrate my mother’s milestone birthday, while the second was actually my first time in many years visiting family for Christmas. I’ve taken to adding side trips to these visits. Last year I tacked on a mini-vacation on Long Island on the trip up and this year’s June visit included a one-night stop in Hartford, CT to see an Abraham Lincoln tribute river walk complete with sculptures of various styles. For the Christmas trip, because of traffic and some tentative weather forecasts, there was no overnight stop but on the way, I steered the car into Concord, MA. I had started reading a book called The People of Concord just before the drive and wanted to learn more about the vibrant writer community there in the 1800s. I also wanted to stop at the Concord Museum because the Lincoln Memorial Centennial special exhibit that I had missed earlier in the year when it was in western Massachusetts was resident in Concord only until February. The exhibit and the Museum were both fabulous and well worth the stop. A brief side trip on the way back involved Henry Wilson, a Senator during the Civil War that played major roles in at least two Lincoln achievements (later he was Ulysses S. Grant’s second vice president).

There was one more short travel event in November. I attended the Lincoln Forum in Gettysburg, PA, where I gave some presentations and accepted the prestigious Wendy Allen Award on behalf of the Lincoln Group of DC, of which I am currently president.

Overall, it was a good travel year despite the challenges (not mention being busy with my book release, which I’ll talk more about in my annual writer’s life post).

So, what’s up for 2023?

Fingers crossed that we don’t get a resurgence of COVID or some other pandemic-related restrictions. But assuming a year at least as available as this one, 2023 should be a good travel year. We’re already booked on a Windstar small ship cruise in April from Lisbon to Barcelona with many stops along the way, including Casablanca, Morocco. That will give us a second country in Africa and a far different experience than Tanzania. Earlier in the April I’ll be doing a road trip to New England that will combine my previously planned “Chasing Abraham Lincoln” stops plus some more related to a possible new writing project. November will have the annual Lincoln Forum. Beyond that, the travel schedule is still in flux. There are a couple of big overseas options I’m considering for late in the year, but I would like to get some sort of travel – either overseas or road trip – in during the summer. I’ll also plan on road tripping to see family at least twice more in the year, plus some shorter day-tripping to see key locations less far afield. And of course, there are all those plans that the “COVID era” put on the back burner, so we’ll have to see what fits into my schedule. Stay tuned!

[Photo credit: Ru Sun (See the lion outside the window?)]

Fire of Genius

 

Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America is available at booksellers nationwide.

Limited signed copies are available via this website. The book also listed on Goodreads, the database where I keep track of my reading. Click on the “Want to Read” button to put it on your reading list. Please leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon if you like the book.

You also follow my author page on Facebook.

David J. Kent is President of the Lincoln Group of DC and the author of Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America and Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America.

His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World and two specialty e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.

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Abraham Lincoln Book Acquisitions for 2022

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Books 2019Even when I’m trying to reduce the number of books in my house I end up with more. My Abraham Lincoln book acquisition total for 2022 is 34, and that number includes some books that are Lincoln-ish. You can read about past years acquisitions by scrolling through this link.

Recall that in 2021 I acquired a ton of Lincoln books that weren’t actually mine but belong to the Lincoln Group of DC. I’ve been working since then to remove them from my office through a combination of donations to Lincoln Group members and libraries. As a group, we even donated a box to an organization that supplies prisons with reading materials for those incarcerated. I still have a lot left, but I’ve reduced the pile enough to move the remainder out of my office. I’ve also removed some duplicates from my own collection. I’ll celebrate reclaiming my office table by starting a Lincoln-themed puzzle over the holidays.

Ah, but no matter how many I removed, I added more. My biggest acquisition was my own book, Lincoln: The Fire of Genius, which was published in September. Mostly the sales are from the usual booksellers – Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Independent bookstores (including the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop in Chicago, with whom I did a release day video interview that you can watch here), and even places like Walmart, Target, Books-A-Million, etc. You can even find it in bookstores in Canada, the UK, Australia, and elsewhere. In addition to the stores, I acquired a few boxes of Fire of Genius for sale at in-person events. I have plenty of such events coming up, as well as recordings of past events, all of which are listed on my Media page.

One of the reasons I acquired fewer books this year was that I was not on the ALI book award review committee this year, mainly because I wanted Fire of Genius to be considered for the award. Nevertheless, I still acquired many of the key books that came out in 2022, including some by big name authors. Early in the year I purchased CNN commentator John Avlon’s Lincoln and the Fight for Peace. I enjoyed the book and to put an exclamation point on it I actually moderated a discussion with Avlon for the Lincoln Group in March. The biggest name in Lincoln books this year is clearly Pulitzer Prize winner Jon Meacham, whose And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle topped the New York Times bestseller list. I had the privilege of meeting Meacham at a special event at St. John’s Church across the street from the White House, as well as a couple of other events. Another Jon (this was a big year for authors named John/Jon), Jonathan W. White also had a book come out that I enjoyed, A House Built by Slaves: African American Visitors to the White House. When it comes to big names in Lincoln studies, there is of course Harold Holzer, whose 2009 book The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now has found a place on my shelves. All of these, by the way, also were signed to me by the authors. Being president of the Lincoln Group of DC and winning an award at the Lincoln Forum has its perks.

Other notable books acquired this past year include some related to my own book research topic, including Carol Adrienne’s Healing a Divided Nation: How the American Civil War Revolutionized Western Medicine and Kenneth Noe’s The Howling Storm: Weather, Climate, and the American Civil War. I also picked up The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, with Nikole Hannah-Jones as project leader. The book is a much-expanded version of the original New York Times series of essays that garnered a Pulitzer Prize despite (or perhaps because of) the raging controversy over misrepresentation/misinterpretation of the founding fathers’ motives and of Lincoln’s views on race. Hannah-Jones tweaked her lead essay in an attempt to correct unsupportable positions even as she stood by them, which unfortunately distracts from the rest of the book, which is a worthwhile, and largely fact-based, discussion of systemic racial discrimination that continues to this day.

I acquired two special books from Lincoln Group members. Ross Heller produced by Abraham Lincoln: His 1958 Time Capsule, which faithfully captures a campaign notebook he provided to a colleague in the year he ran against Stephen A. Douglas for Senate. The book adds in the intriguing history of the notebook’s travels and reproduction. The second is by Daniel R. Smith, Sr., whose Son of a Slave: A Black Man’s Journey in White America is a memoir of the life of a man whose father was born enslaved in 1863 and who sired Dan at the age of 70. Dan, who has been called the Black Forrest Gump because of how often he was a part of historical events, was a long-time member of the Lincoln Group until he passed away at the age of 90 just two weeks before the book was released. His widow Loretta Neumann, also a long time Lincoln Group member, was gracious enough to inscribe my copy of the book yesterday during the Group’s annual holiday luncheon. I’ll have reviews of both these books in the next Lincolnian newsletter.

As can be seen in the list below, my definition of “Lincoln” books is a bit fuzzier in some cases this year. Some are more Civil War-centric than specifically Lincoln, but nevertheless are Lincolnesque. Others may be more obliquely related to future book projects. One interesting book I picked up is called The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power by Jules Witcover. Published in 2014, it gives fairly short (several pages) overviews of the lives of all the vice presidents up through Biden (as VP). Some VPs became president either by the death of their predecessor (e.g., Andrew Johnson, Lyndon Baines Johnson) or future election (e.g., Nixon), but their vice presidency is often overlooked. I fortuitously came upon this book just days after deciding to look deeper into a particular VP for a likely future project. Funny how that works. And of course, I also acquired books that are not at all Lincoln-related that I do not put into my spreadsheet. The spreadsheet itself is now 1639 lines, with some of those lines being multiple volume books such as the 10-volume Nicolay and Hay series.

In anticipation of 2023 acquisitions, it’s time to make some more space on the shelves.

See the 2022 list showing author/title/publication date below my signature blurb below.

Fire of Genius

 

Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America is available at booksellers nationwide.

Limited signed copies are available via this website. The book also listed on Goodreads, the database where I keep track of my reading. Click on the “Want to Read” button to put it on your reading list. Please leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon if you like the book.

You also follow my author page on Facebook.

David J. Kent is President of the Lincoln Group of DC and the author of Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America and Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America.

His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World and two specialty e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.

 

Here is the 2022 list! [Author, Title, Date of Publication]

Abraham Lincoln: Selected Writings 2013
Adrienne, Carole Healing a Divided Nation: How the American Civil War Revolutionized Western Medicine 2022
Alford, Terry In the Houses of Their Dead: The Lincolns, The Booths, and The Spirits 2022
Avlon, John Lincoln and the Fight for Peace 2022
Ballard, Colin R. The Military Genius of Abraham Lincoln 1952
Brewster, Todd Lincoln’s Gamble: The Tumultuous Six Months That Gave America the Emancipation Proclamation and Changed the Course of the Civil War 2014
Brooks, Paul The People of Concord: American Intellectuals and Their Timeless Ideas 1990
Conner, Jane Hollenbeck Lincoln in Stafford 2006
Eggert, Gerald G. The Iron Industry in Pennsylvania 1994
Escott, Paul D. “What Shall We Do with the Negro?”: Lincoln, White Racism, and Civil War America 2009
Goodwin, Cardinal John Charles Fremont: An Explanation of His Career 1930
Hannah-Jones, Nikole and many others The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story 2021
Heller, Ross E. (editor) by Abraham Lincoln: His 1858 Time Capsule 2022
Henson, D. Leigh Inventing Lincoln: Approaches to His Rhetoric 2017
Holzer, Harold (Ed,) The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now 2009
Hord, Fred Lee and Norman, Matthew D. Knowing Him by Heart: African Americans on Abraham Lincoln 2023
Kent, David J. Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America 2022
Lewis, Lloyd Myths After Lincoln 1973
Manning, Alan Father Lincoln: The Untold Story of Abraham Lincoln and His Boys-Robert, Eddy, Willie, and Tad 2016
Martin, William The Lincoln Letter: A Peter Fallon Novel 2012
McCormick, Anita Louise The Industrial Revolution in American History 1998
Meacham, Jon And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle 2022
Mearns, David C. Largely Lincoln 1961
Nelson, Megan Kate The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West 2020
Noe, Kenneth W. The Howling Storm: Weather, Climate, and the American Civil War 2020
Rubenstein, David M. The American Experiment: Dialogues on a Dream 2021
Schwartz, Barry Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory 2000
Smith, Daniel R. Sr. Son of a Slave: A Black Man’s Journey in White America 2022
Taaffe, Stephen R. Commanding Lincoln’s Navy: Union Naval Leadership During the Civil War 2009
Trachtenberg, Alan Lincoln’s Smile and Other Enigmas 2007
Walker, David and Smyth, Damon The Life of Frederick Douglass: A Graphic Narrative of a Slave’s Journey from Bondage to Freedom 2018
White, Jonathan W. A House Built by Slaves: African American Visitors to the White House 2022
Willis, Deborah The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship 2021
Witcover, Jules The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power 2014

 

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Tanzania and Fire of Genius for the Holidays

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The end of November and beginning of December has been a whirlwind of traveling and Fire of Genius activities. I went to Tanzania, and now suddenly it’s time to order your signed copy of Lincoln: The Fire of Genius for the holidays.

One word I heard a lot in Tanzania was “Awesome!” Our small group visited several of Tanzania’s National Parks including Tarangire, Serengeti, Mt. Kilimanjaro, and the Ngorongoro Crater Conservation area. There were all the big animals you expect to see on a photo safari, visits with three different indigenous peoples (including a morning hunt with the Hadzabe), and some of the most incredible vistas on the planet. There was even an unforgettable sunrise balloon ride over the Serengeti. I’m still digging out, but I’ll have more details and photos shortly. Here’s a taste:

Because of the trip, the timeline has jumped from Thanksgiving to the beginning of the December holidays. Which means time is getting short to buy copies of Lincoln: The Fire of Genius. You can order or pick up at all the usual booksellers – Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Target, Walmart, and ideally, your local independent bookstore. [If they don’t have it, ask them to order it] I also have first edition copies you can order direct from me if you want a signed book. I’ll even inscribe it the way you want, either for you or to whomever you plan to gift it to for Hanukkah or Christmas or the holiday (or birthday) of your choice. Want more information on the book? Check out the videos and podcasts on my Media page. More events are being added daily.

Order here for signed copies. Want a copy sooner – check out Barnes and Noble or your local independent bookstore.

The reception for the book has been wonderful, with many people reaching out to say how much they liked it and its unique view of Abraham Lincoln. In fact, one person in my Tanzania group said they had started reading it just before heading on the trip! As always, if you like the book, please leave a rating/review on Amazon, Goodreads, and similar places.

The holidays are coming quickly, and this time of year is notorious for heavy traffic by the usual shipping companies, so ORDER NOW to ensure you receive the book in time, either for yourself or as a gift for your loved ones.

Fire of Genius

 

Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America is available at booksellers nationwide.

Limited signed copies are available via this website. The book also listed on Goodreads, the database where I keep track of my reading. Click on the “Want to Read” button to put it on your reading list. Please leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon if you like the book.

You also follow my author page on Facebook.

David J. Kent is President of the Lincoln Group of DC and the author of Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America and Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America.

His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World and two specialty e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.