Reading this immediately after Jenny Offill's The Weather has made me question why I like these books so immensely. And because the theme of both thesReading this immediately after Jenny Offill's The Weather has made me question why I like these books so immensely. And because the theme of both these books is "and maybe the answer isn't that flattering," I'm willing to entertain that possibility too. I like the centering of voices of slightly scattered, deeply ruminative subjectivities whose power in the actual universe does not feel to them very great. I like to believe that simply analyzing complex problems and trying to produce a somewhat witty new view of them is valuable in itself, even when no answers are forthcoming. I like the centering female voices and the oblique venting given to anger experienced by women, always couched in plenty of humor and trenchant observation: see how attractive all our anger actually is? It's practically art.
Chang's book is by far the more organized and traditional of the two books, following a much more structured plot in which the narrator leaves her first full-time job in the world of tech journalism to follow her boyfriend across the country to graduate school, and then travels to Hong Kong to visit her father who now lives there. Chang's narrator starts out as ambitious at the same time that she doesn't want to give up her right to critique the idiocies of the corporate world. Traveling across the US to Ithaca, NY with her boyfriend allows her to keep her fish out of water narration, amping it up for an angry exploration of racism and what it might mean for her own mixed-race relationship. And her trip to visit her father in Hong Kong allows for yet another way she can maintain her outsider status in a book whose main interest lies not in what's going on outside, but what's going on internally. So yeah -- that might be the fantasy Chang and Offill are both offering us -- that in the age of social media, when compressed and surprising takes on one's life are practically currency, we might form beautiful thoughts on our life that will be widely appreciated without our ever having to be anything but bemused onlookers at someone else's mess. Which perhaps is a fantasy tangential to the core of the book: Chang's careful documentation of how other Americans (and then Chinese) respond to her as an Asian-American reminds us over and over that she's always being indirectly told: this isn't your mess. This doesn't belong to you.
I don't know -- this is a very half-baked thought. What if the sum of the books (together perhaps with Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking About This which is next on my to-read list) winds up being a fascination with the form and power of the narration? Does that undermine (for the broader consuming audience) Chang's substantial engagement with anti-Asian racism?...more
Completely 100% bonkers true crime story about a pathologically thorough identity thief who ruins a whole family's financial personhoods. And surprisiCompletely 100% bonkers true crime story about a pathologically thorough identity thief who ruins a whole family's financial personhoods. And surprisingly for a story written by a professor of consumer credit, it is really strikingly good at evoking the where of the crime -- small-town Indiana, the mobile home park on the lake full of family memories, Purdue University from the point of view of a very impoverished undergraduate, a midwest criss-crossed by a stressed adult daughter trying to keep her job and look after her parents. In fact, while the 100% bonkers story (and it is bonkers. I mean, even for the best true crime, this is a whole different level) will keep you turning pages, the author's ability to summon up the places where it all occurred is probably what will keep it on your mind for a long time after you are done.
Also, even though the solving of the crime will leave you incredulous and a bit flattened by the evil that humans can do, Axton Betz-Hamilton's resilience, persistence, and very dry sense of humor will also make you feel pretty darn good about being a fellow member of the same human race.
NB: If you're coming to this book because you listened to the episode of Criminal with Axton Betz-Hamilton, there's still LOTS this book recounts that wasn't even gestured toward on that podcast....more
A book about exercise yes, but also a book about how we read literature to invent our lives, and then depend on literature to explain to ourselves theA book about exercise yes, but also a book about how we read literature to invent our lives, and then depend on literature to explain to ourselves the lives we have tried to invent. And also a book about how the geological layers of consumer goods that accumulate over the course of our lives become embedded texture in our biographies. And also, a pretty sturdy introduction to nineteenth-century English-language transcendentalists and their Beat inheritors. This book, like the body Alison Bechdel builds and cultivates over the course of five decades, just does a lot. And yet -- I think the introductory chapter actually makes the book more accessible than her previous Are You My Mother? even though it might be even more intellectually ambitious....more
With her faulty arthritic knee, her sense of doom, her meandering, and her scepticism that our concept of the pathology of "co-dependence" can even maWith her faulty arthritic knee, her sense of doom, her meandering, and her scepticism that our concept of the pathology of "co-dependence" can even make sense in a world where everything is interdependent, I am this narator. I have no critical distance. It helps even more that this is written in a format designed to be friendly to brains deeply anxious and distracted. The truest moment in the book come when the teacher of the meditation class declines to speak in terms of victims and punishment at the moment the #metoo movement erupts. "She spoke instead of reincarnation. Everyone here has done everything to everyone else."
Can we handle this way of thinking? Of course we can't. I can barely read the parts in this book which revisit the days after Trump's election, and it's been over four years now. The narrator's micro-paragraphs and zippy punchlines are the only thing that can even make absorbing the content of this book possible. What is the fundamental delusion? The idea that we exist as separate individual entities at all. Only fiction can make letting go of that delusion not just ok but inevitable....more
Completely gripping double biography of two of the most sensational women of the last five hundred years. Mary Wollstonecraft is the superstar here, fCompletely gripping double biography of two of the most sensational women of the last five hundred years. Mary Wollstonecraft is the superstar here, for being a self-made woman of staggeringly iron-clad character, but Mary Shelley shines as a daughter trying to deal with the radical heritage from a mother she never knew. Written as a novelistic page-turner, the telling satisfies entirely, even though you do have to refrain from questioning some of Gordon's rather arbitrary judgments (why WAS Godwin's second wife vilified for doing basically what what Wollstonecraft also had done?). Also, Percy Shelley was a complete lunatic. The details of his almost-entirely-white-bread-based diet were worth the price of admission all by themselves.
Only reason not to read is if you wanted to preserve your hero worship of William Godwin who just can not come off very well, no matter how you tell the story....more
In the first two hundred pages a really compelling portrayal of mother-son dynamics in the wake of an unbelievably messy personal history that interseIn the first two hundred pages a really compelling portrayal of mother-son dynamics in the wake of an unbelievably messy personal history that intersected with an equally messed-up public history. So promising. But the book's real loyalties are to genre fiction. Action sequences quickly take over as the book's main focus, and the emotional resonance never really returns. The spatial layout of the book's very particular world matters a lot, but I found it difficult to track through the book's language. Were we underground, or under a dome? Why did we keep going deeper? What levels signalled that it was safe to breathe? Where were all these hallways coming from? It became a huge barrier to enjoyment for me.
The counterfactual setting of a civil war that never ends helps to populate the plot with all kinds of compellingly textured characters -- deserters, tongueless immigrants from China, escaped slaves turned profiteers, and of course, zeppelin pilots on the lam. But beyond that, the book doesn't offer any particular reflection about the direction our shared history actually took.
Likable, but flawed. I wouldn't recommend it to a friend....more
I consumed this as an audio-book and the author's soothing, cultured British accent purrs forth a pile of reasons why gardening is good for you, makesI consumed this as an audio-book and the author's soothing, cultured British accent purrs forth a pile of reasons why gardening is good for you, makes you feel connected to the planet, can be healing for the traumatized mind. It wasn't quite what the reviews I had read promised, which was a sense that psycho-analytic theory needs to take into account our interactions with nature. So it was more like a warm soothing infomercial for the benefits of gardening than a sudden new theory of mind that takes our interactions with nature into account. I found the chapter on gardening and anthropology the most interesting. Did you know that some Brazilian tribes accord two statuses of motherhood? One for your kids, and one for your plants....more
If you haven't given much thought to how your yard/ landscaping habits interact with the fate of the planet, this is a great informative introduction.If you haven't given much thought to how your yard/ landscaping habits interact with the fate of the planet, this is a great informative introduction. If you HAVE thought a lot about native plants and pollinators and microfauna this book doesn't have a whole lot new to add. It's nicely argued for newbies. The notion of treating your yard as a little slice of National Park conservation is good shorthand for a lot of things he wants to communicate.
But if you are already converted, you don't need to buy the book. Here are the three main things he advocates: Planting plants that support a wide variety of moth and butterfly larvae, making your yard welcoming to pollinators (not just with plants, but also by leaving up dead plants through winter, so they have a place to nest), and dimming the artificial light you place outside your house so it doesn't interfere with insect and moth night life.
If you aren't sure how to do the first thing, my advice would be to visit the Wildlife Federation's Native Plant Finder here:
(Tallamy's lab was instrumental in putting this together). Enter your zip code and you'll pull up a list of plants that are native to your area, and that host the most native butterflies and moths. Then do some research on the plants that appeal to you the most (Missouri Botanical Gardens have a fabulous internet-based Plant Finder that gives the scoop on how to grow most native plants, for instance) and make some decisions about what to plant.
You can access the book's argument in any number of interviews he's done (there's a nice one on Mary Roach's A Way to Garden blog), and skip paying for the book. It's ok -- he has a day job. He's not going to starve. What you're going to miss by not buying the book is some clunky writing and also some weird tin-eared anecdotes involving his own family. He reports having an argument with his adult son about whether to allow a fox to live in the yard which makes his son look bad and gives Tallamy the last word in the argument. Halfway through the book he mentions that his wife weeds their yard, and then told a story that presented her as if she had no idea that native plants might be useful for the environment. Um, really? This is at least Tallamy's third book on the subject. There's good reason to think his wife is on to the general idea. Also, I'll confess -- my interest in reading the book waned considerably once he presented himself as an ecologist offering advice on how to landscape, who was too busy -- or sexist? -- to actually weed his own yard.
The author wants to present a positive, action-oriented argument for contributing positively to the environment, and focuses on insects, pollinators, butterflies and moths as important to supporting the bird population. All good -- I'm on board. But his elementary lessons in ecology don't entirely make sense. The book has very little vision for imagining how this ecosystem of what you plant in your yard and the winged things that live in and on them aligns with a larger eco-system of foxes, box-turtles, toads, deer, etc. who occasionally surface in his book. He mentions early in the book that he wants yards to increase their "carrying capacity," by which he means the number of species they can support, but he also mentions that there are too many deer, and deer numbers need to decrease. Ok, I can see that argument, but that also means that planting our yards with natives to support micro-fauna is not really a restoration project: we're not going back to the same level of mega-fauna that the area once supported. So what sort of ecology are we creating? Tallamy's book too often implies that as long as we use our yards to support bugs and birds and humans, everything will be just fine. Except for that one moment where he suggests that humans need to have only two children per couple, and put an end to the Ponzi scheme of social security, which requires us to have more children. That was a distraction, not an illuminating moment of ecological clarity.
Again, I get that he wants to support positive action rather than hand-wringing without any change in behavior. And I'm on board. But I would have found the book a lot more interesting if it had engaged more comprehensively with precisely what we are "conserving" and why. In the end, the book doesn't quite feel aimed at grown-ups -- it's a bit too fake-folksy condescending, with anecdotes that can often flirt with true wince-worthiness. I guess I would have preferred a book that treated me more like a grown-up and maybe presented the author himself as treating grown-ups as if they were grown-ups....more
This is 100% confirmation bias porn -- imagine someone whose position you don't understand at all suddenly coming to think JUST LIKE YOU. But like allThis is 100% confirmation bias porn -- imagine someone whose position you don't understand at all suddenly coming to think JUST LIKE YOU. But like all good porn, it suffers from weak characterization and ludicrous plotting. If I surveyed my most aggressively atheist NYC-born-and-bred friends about what they thought life was like for a Pentecostal preacher in small-town Tennessee, most of them would have trouble coming up with the terrible stereotypes generated in the first half of this book. Which also wind up being stereotypes that hurt marginalized people -- all preachers' wives are bitchy and just want status; when a kid goes to a therapist, it's just because his mom is bad and needs to change.
I've read several reviews that say it gets better in the second half of the book, but HE KIDNAPPED HIS OWN KID. Also, gets set up as a white savior with his viral moment of pleading "let's not judge." I could not ride that train all the way through to the finish line.
The whole time I was consuming the first half of the book I was thinking Silas House was a newly minted MFA, and this was his first production and I kept thinking, eh, well, there are some nice moments, there could have been something here that worked. But the dude apparently has dozens of other books. So, nope. There are lots of newer authors out there whose work deserves attention, and they are working a lot harder on plausibility over pandering. ...more
Highly readable cacophony of voices. Permanent dislodging of the notion that there might be one black British experience. Enjoyed every minute of readHighly readable cacophony of voices. Permanent dislodging of the notion that there might be one black British experience. Enjoyed every minute of reading it. But question of what we inherit and what we invent abides over it all, but very, very loosely. ...more
"Every one imagines that fear and anger, violence and desire, rage laced with the surprise capacity to forgive -- character -- is all that matters in "Every one imagines that fear and anger, violence and desire, rage laced with the surprise capacity to forgive -- character -- is all that matters in the end. [. . . ] To be human is to confuse the satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people. But Ray needs fiction now as much as anyone."
As a book about the truth of impending eco-disaster, this would have been pretty good. But because it's also a book about the puzzle of how to tell the truth of impending eco-disaster in a way that will allow people to listen and to act, it's much much better. And I stand convicted of a desire for fiction -- the story of the trees inside this novel is good, but what hooked me was the world-record life-background character exposition which opens this book. Come for the people. Stay for the trees....more
Is the world a closed system, a dystopian conspiratorial landscape in which "they" control everything, or is there a possibility of soaring above it, Is the world a closed system, a dystopian conspiratorial landscape in which "they" control everything, or is there a possibility of soaring above it, escaping the environment, gaining a vantage from which everything can be understood, with you as the understander? And if you could gain that vantage point, would it make you a genius, a man of science? Or would it make you the master of the plantation?
What most other goodreads readers say is true: the first half of this book is a quickly paced slave narrative/ bildungsroman that makes you cheer on your likeable protagonist, and the second half is a series of coincidences and improbable events that take what we thought was a simple movement from A to desired endpoint Z of freedom, and turn it into a travelogue where we aren't even sure where we are supposed to end up. But maybe that's part of the point -- it's not as if the world into which an escaped slave emerged was going to be simple, and it's not as if science has reassured us of our place in the universe. So why write a novel as if either of those things were true?...more
When I picked up this book, I knew a decent amount about Eleanor Roosevelt, and absolutely nothing about civil rights activist/ legal theorist/ authorWhen I picked up this book, I knew a decent amount about Eleanor Roosevelt, and absolutely nothing about civil rights activist/ legal theorist/ author/ priest/ transgender elder Pauli Murray. But it turns out Pauli Murray is so sensational that she really makes Eleanor Roosevelt look boring and kind of predictable. Seriously -- how did I not know who she was before now?
I know a lot of readers have criticized this book for making Pauli Murray play in concert with ER, when really Murray deserves her own book (she has several). I think that's a fair criticism, but I also think the whole conception of this book was a very clever way to get liberal white ladies like me to read a whole book about Pauli Murray when we'd never heard of her. So -- I salute Patricia Bell Scott. Well-played. It worked. And I DID need to hear about Pauli Murray.
What I like about Murray in this book, is you see so clearly how Murray doesn't always succeed, how her life is constantly interrupted and redirected, and how she isn't always equal to the forces arrayed against her. And yet she keeps going. For instance, when she first gets to college, she isn't a blazing star of a poster child for the oppressed. She is exhausted by how much she has to work, falls asleep in class, ultimately drops out and then GETS MARRIED TO A MAN SHE BARELY KNOWS, counter to her lifelong attraction to women. But -- she keeps going and then DOES wind up getting a degree, and DOES wind up being a sensation at Howard (where some of her student work ultimately winds up getting cited in Brown v Board of education. And of course, she doesn't get much credit). After getting her law degree from the Berkeley, she was appointed to serve as Deputy Attorney General for the state of California -- the first black attorney to ever hold such a position. And yet she had leave the job behind to return to North Carolina and take care of the ailing aunt who raised her. Did I mention that she had a terrible thyroid disorder that manifested as a mood disorder, leading to hospitalizations and breakdowns that made her think she was crazy, an idea reinforced by the era's appalling homophobia? I mean, obviously, I'm not even touching on the barriers posed by Jim Crow, bias against female lawyers, the McCarthy era (in which she was, of course, blacklisted by employers because of early activism associated with socialism). And she kept plugging along, writing the definitive legal text on race-based state laws, then a very well-respected memoir of her family from the Civil War on, then -- oh, I'm not going to spoil it all for you. Just trust me -- at the end of this book you aren't going to remember much about Eleanor Roosevelt, and that's just fine.
So, I've decided Pauli Murray is the hero I need for the next decade. I've just downloaded her memoir as an audio book. I could use a lot more Pauli Murray in my life....more
In _The Wealth of Nations_ Adam Smith creates the conditions for what will become the paradox of work for all industrialized countries: those who do wIn _The Wealth of Nations_ Adam Smith creates the conditions for what will become the paradox of work for all industrialized countries: those who do work, he says, will constantly be thinking about how to do it more efficiently, so they can do less of it. That means that all good workers have to hate their jobs just a little bit, in order to be motivated to do it more efficiently. So what becomes of those who actually love their jobs? Does loving your job make you a bad capitalist? What does one do with vocational love in the context of earning a living?
This conundrum preoccupies this book, a burlesque of Silicon Valley wealth and California foodie-ism that could very well have been co-written by Roald Dahl and Dr. Suess. Fantastical technology and improbable food punctuate what would otherwise be a familiar tale of a young person trying to decide what work makes sense for her life. And since both work and food are necessary for survival, this is also a tale about what sort of food makes sense for one's life. Algorhythmically optimized bagels, bread with faces, fungal party hell-scapes, urban-scale panettones and a grey nutrient called Slurry (tm) are all on the table. And like most young people, our young heroine might think she has more power of choice than she actually does.
Don't expect a profound message at the end of this book: it's a comedy, a reconciliation of opposites. The end of the book will promise you that you can have both the immovable object and the unstoppable force, as long as you listen to your inner-Lois. Or maybe just a few of the Loises in your local Lois club....more
An unsatisfying book to read six years into the Black Lives Matter movement, and two years into this current American presidency. The book opens when An unsatisfying book to read six years into the Black Lives Matter movement, and two years into this current American presidency. The book opens when a 17-year-old African-American from Benton Harbor is found dead in the St. Joseph River, having ostensibly fallen in the river while in the town of St. Joseph. The citizens of the predominantly black and very poor Benton Harbor, where the boy, Eric, is from, believe Eric to be the victim of a murder. They believe he was most likely killed by white people in a crime that was not properly investigated by white police. The citizens of the predominantly white and middle-class St. Joseph, right next door, see Eric's drowning as an accident that Benton Harbor residents are using as an excuse to whine about race.
As soon as it becomes clear that the author isn't going to solve the mystery of how Eric died, the book becomes a reflection on racial tension, and on how the experience of race shapes your sense of what is probable and likely. It is not very satisfying or deep, although maybe in 1998 it was a strikingly new contribution to the conversation on race in the US. In his book _There Are No Children Here_, Kotlowitz was exemplary at getting out of the way and letting his subjects speak in their own clear voices. Here, maybe because no one has anything very penetrating to say about racial relations, that technique just yields a lot of murk and not much that's even memorable.
The book's structure changes from being driven by the question "Was Eric's death a murder or an accident?" to "Why is it that the two towns can't share a viewpoint on this incident?" and as it does, the "answer" to the question becomes a long exposition of current racial tensions: controversies over school board leaders and prior police abuses of black citizens in the area. One of these episodes -- a 21-year-old shot to death by a cop who mistook him for someone else -- is especially unsatisfying because we get extended and somewhat sympathetic characterization of the cop who shot him, and we are never told anything about the man who actually died. The loss of middle-class jobs, the gutting of a decent police force, and the infiltration of Benton Harbor by gangs from Detroit and Chicago complete the picture.
At the end of the book, the author concludes that he's seen people from both towns work on developing relationships with one another, but 20 years later this seems laughably optimistic. The state of Michigan put the city of Benton Harbor into receivership for several years (ending, I think, in 2017), appointing a non-democratically elected city manager to make all the decisions involved in running the city. This is the same arrangement which resulted in Flint's water crisis, for those of you keeping tabs at home. Local corporation Whirlpool "invested" in helping to build a world-class golf-course in Benton Harbor -- for which the owners of the golf course will pay no property taxes -- as a move to economically develop Benton Harbor. Surprisingly, not a lot of Benton Harbor residents play golf. This summer the governor of Michigan announced plans to close Benton Harbor's high school, and farm out the students to ten surrounding rural high schools. This is a decision that's still under negotiation, but all signs point toward bridges that have NOT been built, and racism that proceeds apace on a systematic level....more
I had to get past my preconceptions of what this book was supposed to be in order to appreciate it for what it was. I **thought** it was going to be sI had to get past my preconceptions of what this book was supposed to be in order to appreciate it for what it was. I **thought** it was going to be sort of a liberal chick-historicaromance, where I'd get to learn a few facts about Peruvian geopolitics in the 1980s and 1990s, and get swept along by tales of lost love, and maybe vicariously participate in a brave resistance movement. Instead, what I got was a much quieter tale of the aftermath of terrible upheaval, the sort of moral grey fog that settles in on people who once had much clarity about which side was right and which side was wrong, but now are just living with the terrible grief of so many lives lost. Also -- it's not really a girl book at all, despite having a woman as its nominal main character. The narrative energy always settles around the men in this book. Not a bad thing -- just a thing that's not easy to tell from the marketing material.
Anyway, if you're looking to use this book to learn something about recent South American history, it's no good for that. The action actually takes place in a "nameless South American country" whose status in reality is parallel with the cities in China Mieville's The City and The City and Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist. The generic setting (which some reviewers on goodreads equate with sci-fi -- very provocative) allows it to focus intensively on the affects of aftermath, making it something much more original than your average airport-worthy historical novel....more
Isn't it weird that everyone in the world knows who Jack the Ripper is, but no one knows who his victims were? Or rather -- everyone THINKS they know Isn't it weird that everyone in the world knows who Jack the Ripper is, but no one knows who his victims were? Or rather -- everyone THINKS they know who his victims were. They were prostitutes, right?
For that reason, the CONCEPT behind this book is brilliant: Rubenhold sifts through the historical records, finds a surprising amount of information about the women who were murdered by Ripper, and it turns out maybe two of them were prostitutes, but even then, not for most of their lives. And the fact that so-called "Ripper-ologists" hate this book suggests something quite unpleasant about those who obsess over the Victorian mass-murderer: perhaps what draws them to the story is the idea that the East End offered a mass of anonymous women whose bodies were easily available for money and whose particular identities never mattered.
Unfortunately, in execution, the book is a bit of a slog. Rubenhold's narrative energy often depends heavily on connecting slender historical records with lots of "would have"s and "as many Victorian women did"s. This might work for a vivid extended magazine article, but for a whole book it's tiring. It will take a very disciplined -- or very unimaginative -- reader to not eventually start to object "Yes, but maybe this would have happened instead." Perhaps most grating is her constant insistence that all of the women loved their husbands, loved their children, wanted to be good wives and mothers but alcohol, lack of money, and family troubles got in the way. This feels a bit too much like pushing them into a domestic box that several of them were obviously trying to climb out of. Maybe some of them were overwhelmed with marriage. Maybe some of them just couldn't adjust to constantly catering to the needs of very young children. They certainly wouldn't have been the only Victorian women who felt that way. At times Rubenhold seems a bit terrified that if she portrays them as too independent-minded or rebellious, some reader might conclude that they deserved to die anyway.
If you don't know a lot about the conditions of the poor in late-nineteenth-century London, this books certainly offers a factual account that might really be compelling, but the structure of telling the story victim by victim winds up feeling quite repetitive....more
Don't even bother reading this review. Just read the book. Or better yet, listen to the audiobook which Laymon reads himself with all the gorgeous rhyDon't even bother reading this review. Just read the book. Or better yet, listen to the audiobook which Laymon reads himself with all the gorgeous rhythms and intonations that he must have had in mind when he was writing every carefully crafted sentence. This is a text of extraordinary beauty about the extraordinary beauty of language -- "that black abundance" -- while it is also a text about excruciating work and suffering. There is much in this book that is very difficult to listen to: if you need to avoid representations of sexual violence, you probably need to skip the first chapter altogether. There's also a lot in this book that challenged me, as a white person. Laymon and I are almost exact contemporaries, and the tales he has to tell of the level of racism he experienced growing up are tales that the teenaged me thought were only the sort of thing that happened in the early 1960s and before. Which says a lot about my white privilege, about how I didn't have to really think about what it was like for my black peers, even when we were attending the same schools, watching the same tv programs, listening to the same music. Laymon's exceptional talent is in turning that stuff that I didn't have to think about into veritable earworms, short catchphrases and repeated sentences that are really really hard to leave behind.
But as Laymon makes clear, this isn't a text that's written for me. He says again and again it's written to his mom, and that it's written for black people, and that frees him to say all the stuff that his mom never wanted him to say out loud because white people might overhear it, and then use it against him. Laymon's emphasis on address makes his memoir part of the tradition created by James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me: books whose truths depend on the rhetoric of address, on careful attention to what can be said to whom. But where Baldwin and Coates speak to the next generation as men speaking to boys, Laymon navigates the much trickier terrain of speaking across genders and backwards to the older generation. It's a tricky public performance, because perhaps the most repeated old saw of black respectability politics is that black men need to step up and be fathers to black boys; that's the space into which Baldwin and Coates step with their essays, insisting that in order to be elders they must freely speak unpleasant truths about white America.
While Laymon certainly doesn't shy away from speaking unpleasant truths about white America, his challenge lies in telling the truth about how very many terrible things happened to him as the child of a poor black single mother, and yet not giving in to the patriarchal assumptions of respectability politics. His extraordinary ability to excavate the love present in his childhood and the love required to be an ethical teacher allows him to succeed....more
So the "geopolitical events filtered through the eyes of an observant but innocent child" genre is pretty well-worn, and there's a very high bar for dSo the "geopolitical events filtered through the eyes of an observant but innocent child" genre is pretty well-worn, and there's a very high bar for doing it well. In its first 120 pages, this book doesn't really clear the bar. In fact it meanders with occasional spurts of magical realism that don't add up to much and then it meanders some more. And that's where I gave up and started reading some reviews of the book -- a NY Times review, a few interviews with the author on the literary blog The Millions. AND -- that sent me back to the book, because the reviews and interviews had spoilers about the major hook of the story, which made even the choice of child-narrator make more sense. Also, around page 120, the pacing gets brisker and the details begin to accumulate into something.
SO -- if you are having trouble getting through this book, go online, get a few spoilers, and then return to it. I think a really good editor would have insisted on the major event being revealed at the outset of the book, since it opens as a retrospective narration anyway. It would have given the reader more of a sense of HEADING somewhere.
Overall, not a bad read, but definitely not life-changing. If you read it and you are the average US citizen, you'll be better acquainted than you were before you started with some of the main events and characters of the last 40 years of Colombian history, but you won't really have a better grasp of what set it all into motion....more
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