Summer is around the corner. With it comes the annual media release of the books to read on vacation. From “beach reading” to serious stuff, the suggestions are out there.

While I have always personally spent much of my free time reading a wide variety of texts throughout the year, I believe it would be salutary this summer to recommend those fiction and non-fiction texts that enhance our understanding of the troubled times we are living in. We have a President who takes pride in not reading anything beyond a menu and his golf score; we should not replicate that behavior.

Let’s begin with a book that is repeatedly identified as Stephen King’s finest novel, The Stand. It is a dystopian story that sheds light on a variety of current issues: authoritarianism, American society, violence, and leadership. It is certainly a horror story, but its monsters—and heroes—are ourselves.

The Stand, in its current paperback iteration, is 1439 pages. It was originally  trimmed by King’s publisher in the 1970’s because of the costs and risks involved in publishing a monster-sized text written by a then relatively unproven author.  In 1986 came the restoration of the  entire volume.

The book begins with an existential situation: at an American germ laboratory a deadly flu-like virus is accidentally released which, eventually, will kill 90+ percent of the American people. Why some individuals are spared is never fully explained. Halfway thru the novel we meet Mother Abagail and Randall Flagg; they represent, respectively, surrogates for their mentors, God and Satan.

Following a meandering course around the nation, disciples of Mother Abagail and Flagg, end up in Boulder, Colorado and Las Vegas, Nevada respectively. Prior to their travels, they were subject to dreams containing images of both surrogates. Given the obvious implications of their decisions, they are taking major “stands” regarding their future. Ties to current events are easy to draw.

In a June 2, 2019 column in The New York Times, Maureen Dowd criticizes Attorney General William Barr for his failure to protect the country in the face of Trump’s transgressions, as revealed in the Mueller Report. She even more severely criticizes Robert Mueller for refusing to take a position on the issue of “obstruction of justice,” citing the fact that Barr himself stated that Mueller’s professed excuse—a Justice Department regulation that precludes indicting a sitting President—did not apply.

In King’s novel, the repeated cry is the necessity for individuals to take positions, to take “stands.” Failure to do so, in King’s world, can lead to tragic consequences. As Maureen Dowd so eloquently sums up Mueller’s dereliction: “Sometimes it’s hard to know who is worse: devils or saints.”