Walter Mosley talks about The Long Fall

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"Mystery writer Walter Mosley explains how his latest novel, "The Long Fall," reflects the way issues of race and class intersect in 21st-century America." (video via Slate)

American Indian Contributions to the World

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Emory Dean Keoke and Kay Marie Porterfield, American Indian Contributions to the World

43. Trade, Transportation, and Warfare
44. Food, Farming, and Hunting.
45. Medicine and Health.
46. Buildings, Clothing, and Art.
47. Science and Technology.

This is a five-volume series, aimed at approx. junior-high schoolers upper elementary grades. (There's a related single-volume Encyclopedia by the same authors; I can't speak to its similarities or differences to the five-volume version, other than that it's apparently aimed at junior-high schoolers.) I've been posting highlights from them in my journal (links above), but wanted to review the series as a whole.

Speaking personally, reading these was almost giddy-making. As a kid, I was given lots of books about Indians that featured nuts and berries, under the misguided notion that this would teach me "pride in my heritage." Plus there was all the elementary school-curriculum stuff -- the one I remember most clearly had us rumpling up paper bags and then cutting armholes and neckholes to make shirts allegedly in the style of Northwest Coast Indians. (The paper bags were supposed to represent cedar bark, and the rumpling was supposed to represent a treatment to soften the fibers, but my primary takeaway was that Indians allegedly made clothes that were ugly, ill-fitting, and uncomfortable, using materials that had all the sophistication of household garbage.¹ Additionally, I keenly remember feeling very alone in that classroom.) Eventually you grow up and learn to debunk those narratives, but there's still a hole at the center, a hole where a truer narrative should have been.

This series is a nice antidote to those all those nuts-and-berries narratives. All week long, I've been trying my friends' patience with all the giddy "...and that's something you have American Indians to thank for!" that I've been doing.

There's an awful lot that I like about these books. In addition to simply providing a list of influences and accomplishments, they implicitly challenge the narrative that the Fertile Crescent is the cradle of civilization, as well as the idea that a "contribution to the world" should be defined as "something adopted by Europeans" or that innovations necessarily default to Europe-and-those-civilizations-claimed-by-Europe unless you can show that another culture did it first. (The way some people tell it, the only things that China ever invented were the compass and gunpowder. Um, no. The Yellow River was an independent cradle of civilization. China invented a whole slew of things.)

The "what counts" debunking is largely implicit, but there's quite a lot of explicit debunking of misconceptions going on in the sidebars to the text. F'rex, there's a really nice sporking of the idea that Indians were too stupid to know the "true" worth of glass beads. (The sidebar uses stamps and stamp collecting as an example of how value is constructed. Bit of paper? Essentially worthless. Put the proper picture on it? Worth an arbitrary number of cents. Make an error in the picture, or make the stamp otherwise rare? Extremely valuable. Glass beads aren't inherently worthless, and certainly weren't worthless in the numbers they initially came to the Americas in. It was importing them by the ton that depreciated their value.) Similarly, a sidebar takes on the notion of "stone age technology" by discussing the relative sharpness of Aztec stone surgical knives and modern surgical scalpels, and that one might sanely choose to use stone, even when metalworking is available. Similarly, the book notes, the Aztecs used stone swords that could behead a Conquistador's horse.

(Speaking of Conquistadors, I loved all the anti-Conquistador snark. Well, okay, technically, there was exactly zero snark -- the tone of the text is all very mature and dignified throughout. That said, anything that scared/upset/befuddled Conquistadors gets an additional paragraph or two. Keoke and Porterfield don't themselves snark, but they sure toss a few soft and easy pitches over the plate for those of us who might want to snark on Conquistadors. I, for one, appreciate it.)

About the only shortcoming to the series, in my mind, is that there are no endnotes. (I know, I know, it's aimed at kids.) But when you're all, "Wow, really? What was the deal with that?" the next few links of the documentation trail aren't in the book, which can be frustrating. :-/

But mostly? These made me very happy, and I'd like to see them get some widespread use.

ETA: Oyate sells both versions: elementary school five-volume version; high school one-volume version.

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1 My library has an ample collection of contemporary books full of similar craft projects, including making religious objects out of paper plates and old magazines. There are days that I want very much to write a "Explore World Religions Through Crafts" book that features directions for making Temple Garments out of garbage bags and how to bake your own Eucharist.

Steven Barnes, Lion's Blood

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48. Steven Barnes, Lion's Blood.

It is the 1860's (Gregorian calendar), and North America is being colonized by Egypt, Ethiopia, Vikings, and China; the Azteca rule Mesoamerica. Our story follows the ever-permutating relationship between Kai, the son of an Ethiopian official in New Djibouti (near what we know as Galveston, Texas), and Aidan, his Irish slave and footboy.

People who were frustrated with Blonde Roots and Naughts and Crosses might well enjoy this one -- the historical timeline and resultant world makes sense.¹ Barnes doesn't get around to actually presenting this world's history to us until a hundred pages in, but I rather liked that -- the whole first part of the book is Aidan's abduction into slavery, and our unfamiliarity of the world makes his disorientation more convincing.

In feel, Lion's Blood is a lot like those sprawling historical epics, the sort of thing they used to make TV miniseries out of. Every once in a while, Barnes seemed to hit a note a little too hard -- there's a pseudo-St. Crispin's Day speech, f'rex, that I would have enjoyed better had I no familiarity with Henry V -- but I find that true of historical epics in general. Slavery is a prominent feature of this book, and there is violence commensurate with that, but something about the book's feel makes those scenes easier to read than pretty much every other book "about" slavery that I've read for this comm.² (Also, much in keeping with this kind of sprawling epic: Kai and Aidan are eminently shippable.)

All in all, this was a perfect bit of long-holiday reading. Nice and thick, very readable, very easy to immerse myself in. I'm looking forward to the second in the series.

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1 Mostly. There's a half-page about a Jewish merchant ship that confuses me.

2 I can't decide if I believe that to be a problem or not.