POSTSCRIPT: One good book leads to another

You know a book is good when it leads you, by the hand, to another book – or two, or three. You know the feeling: You become so emotionally invested in a book that you become excited about its author, and that leads you to more of the author’s other books and writing.

A similar sensation occurs when books reference other books and stories.

Michelle E. Moore’s “Chicago and the Making of American Modernism” led me back to “May Day,” an early and masterful F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, as well as “Tender is the Night,” which I hadn’t before read.

Borges has led me to Cervantes.

Similarly, Edgar Villanueva’s “Decolonizing Wealth” is leading me to two other works. The first is Kenneth Jones and Temo Okun’s, “Dismantling Racism.” In a passage about cultural norms and standards, Villanueva references Jones and Okun, and identifies several characteristics of white supremacy cultures. The second is Terrance Keenan’s “The Promise at Hand.” Terry, who passed away in 2009, was a longtime staffer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a major supporter of the Beethoven Project on Chicago’s South Side, which was the forerunner to the now coast-to-coast Educare Learning Network. “The Promise at Hand,” according to Villanueva, describes the great moral purpose of philanthropy and Terry’s thinking on philanthropic humility.