To celebrate Side/Dishes’s first week online, I’ve prepared a series of daily(ish) shorts drawn from (and released to) the book donation bin at Center for People In Need.
Through Good 360 and the Center’s cornerstone Nebraska Truckloads of Help program, we receive thousands of book donations from participating non-profits and national companies alike, helping put free books in the homes and schools of low-income and high-need families throughout Nebraska.
Democratization of knowledge to those for whom knowledge is only available at significant social costs.
Today’s installment:
On the whole, it is a happy tradition which has made of Otto the most attractive monarch of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Like all successful medieval kings, he could engage in violent and ruthless action; atrocities were committed in his name. But he could also be generous, kindly, and forgiving; he was, it seems, an open-handed, open-hearted man; within his limitations imaginative; a man of great tenacity and courage; and it is hard not to be touched by the story of how when his English queen died he consoled himself by learning to read.
Brooke, “Otto the Great,” Europe In The Central Middle Ages, 962 – 1154 (p. 163)
Side/Dishes 