Campaign for the American Reader: Third reading: D.W. Buffa on the reading list of John F. Kennedy

Thursday, February 16, 2023

Third reading: D.W. Buffa on the reading list of John F. Kennedy

D.W. Buffa's recent novel is The Privilege, the ninth legal thriller involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. The tenth, Lunatic Carnival, will be published soon. He has also just published Neumann's Last Concert, the fourth novel in a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and, finally, America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Buffa writes a monthly review for the Campaign for the American Reader that we're calling "Third Reading." Buffa explains. "I was reading something and realized that it was probably the third time that I knew it well enough to write something about it. The first is when I read it when I was in college or in my twenties, the second, however many years later, when I wanted to see if it was as good as I remembered, and the third when I knew I was going to have to write about it."

Buffa's "Third Reading" of the reading list of John F. Kennedy begins:

When John F. Kennedy gave the commencement speech at Yale and was given an honorary degree, he remarked, “I now have the best of both worlds: a Yale degree and a Harvard education.” When he hosted a dinner for all the living American recipients of the Nobel Prize, he wrote on the margin of his prepared remarks a line that put in perspective the changes in what education had come to mean: “There has not been this much intelligence gathered together in a single room of the White House since Thomas Jefferson dined here alone.” Everyone laughed, but behind the easy charm and civility, Kennedy wanted to remind them that for all our so-called progress, the mind of Thomas Jefferson was beyond our reach, if not our comprehension.

Kennedy had always been a voracious reader. His list of favorite books includes biographies of Lincoln, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and the speeches of Daniel Webster. He read the seven volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and the two thousand pages of Winston Churchill’s biography of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, which some consider the greatest work of history written in the twentieth century. His favorite novel was Stendhal’s The Red and The Black, written in the early 19th century. With his interest in American history, his interest in Thomas Jefferson, it seems more than possible that he read...[read on]

About Buffa's recent novel Neumann’s Last Concert, from the publisher:

Neumann’s Last Concert is a story about music and war and the search for what led to the greatest evil in modern history. It is the story of an American boy, Wilfred Malone, who lost his father in the early days of the Second World War and a German refugee, Isaac Neumann, the greatest concert pianist of his age when he lived in Berlin, but who now lives, anonymous and alone, in a single rented room in a small town a few miles from San Francisco.

Wilfred has a genius for the piano, “a keen curiosity not yet corrupted by vanity” and “a memory that forgot nothing essential.” Neumann, alone in his room, is constantly writing, an endless labyrinth of questions and answers, driving him farther and farther back into the past, searching for the causes, searching for the meaning, of what happened in Germany, trying to understand what had led him, a German Jew, to stay in Germany when he could have left but instead continued to perform right up to the night that during his last concert they took his wife away.

Neumann’s Last Concert is a novel about the great catastrophe of the 20th century and the way in which music, great music, preserves both the hope of human decency amidst the carnage of human insanity and the possibility of what human beings might still accomplish.