Bookshelf - May 2025

Left: Major-General Charles George Gordon, combatant in the Crimean War, commander the "Ever Victorious Army" during the Taiping Rebellion in China, enemy of slavery and Governor-General of the Sudan, where he was slain in 1885 in the defense of Khartoum. Right: Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Haitian revolutionary leader, first ruler of an independent Haiti and first Emperor of Haiti.

It has been a notably dreary Spring here in Baltimore this year, with the temperature frequently dipping back into the 50s under rain-sodden grey skies in what should be a riot of warmth and flowers and buzzing insects to herald the arrival of summer. I visited my cousin at the house she is staying at in the Pennsylvania countryside yesterday and amid the rolling fields of western Lancaster County, just east of where the Susquehanna River continues its lazy journey to the Chesapeake Bay, the overcast weather and temperature evoked November more than May. However, as I sit here in my apartment with the sounds of Bob Marley’s “Jah Live” filling the room I feel an inexplicable kind of internal warmth even among all the horrors of the world right now.

I have been delving into two books connected to two men who, though very different, shared some characteristics of immense physical bravery and a willingness to live true to their beliefs up until their ultimate moment.