Tananarive Due, Patricia Due, Karin Lowachee

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Freedom in the Family, Tananarive and Patricia Due

This is a fantastic book! In alternating chapters, Patricia Stevens Due and her daughter, Tananarive Due, talk about their histories with the Civil Rights movement in different eras. The stories are personal, the writing engaging. I particularly enjoyed being able to see some of the same themes played out in completely different ways in their lives.

The Living Blood, Tananarive Due

This is the sequel to My Soul to Keep, and continues the stories of Jessica and David, both now immortal, as their daughter's mystic powers grow out of control. I had been hoping that this book would be quite different from the last one, considering the ending of MStK. Instead, this is a very similar book in tone and construction. I'm not very fond of the 'mother is afraid her child may be evil' genre, so I found this one disappointing.

Burndive and Cagebird, Karin Lowachee

Oh, I loved these! They are books 2 and 3 of a series (Warchild --book 1 -- has been reviewed in the comm before), but you don't have to read them in order, because they follow different main characters. I love hard science fiction, and these qualify. You get to see the lives and choices of people caught up in the seemingly endless war between human-settled worlds and the alien strits -- and the pirate ships preying on both sides.

Blink; Why are All the Black Kids...; Conquest

[rootedinsong.livejournal.com]

2. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell

Standard Gladwell fare: intriguing, well-written, not particularly deep.

As someone interested in psychology, interpersonal dynamics, and shrink things, I found his discussion of predicting whether relationships will succeed or fail and the elements of facial expressions to be quite interesting. I intend to read about the latter topic in depth (if I ever find the time).

His discussions of stereotype threat and unconscious racism give some good information for countering the sort of "not racist" racist things you're likely to hear these days.

3. Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race, by Beverly Daniel Tatum

A strong introduction to anti-racism. I especially appreciated the in-depth discussion of racial identity formation.

4. Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, by Andrea Smith

What everyone else said. Very hard to read, at least for me, but brilliant and devastating. This is what we should keep in mind as an example of what an intersectional analysis should be.

(Note: It does repeat the vaccines-cause-autism myth, which may discredit it in the eyes of people inclined to be skeptical - but maybe this isn't worth mentioning, since people who are inclined to discredit it will probably find a reason to no matter what.)

Partial bibliography from Recognition of Being

[oyceter]

I grabbed these from the bibliography of Kim Anderson's A Recognition of Being: Reconstructing Native Womanhood (2000). Anderson is Cree/Métis. I took all the books with Native authors or co-authors, including ones with white editors that seemed to be majority-Native authors. For books with Native co-authors, I didn't exclude ones in which the Native co-authors are in the minority (ex. 2 non-Native authors, 1 Native) because I thought people could still use it to look up other books by the Native co-author. There are other women of color authors also in the bibliography, but I excluded them to keep the focus on Native authors.

( Giant list of books )

Kanyen'keha Tewatati; One Thousand Useful Mohawk Words

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5. Kanyen'keha Tewatati (Let's Speak Mohawk), by David Kanatawakhon Maracle

The first thing I noticed about this book was that it was awfully thin for a language textbook. (I bought the edition with CDs, for which Amazon misleadingly lists the dimensions as 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.1 inches. The page for the edition without CDs gives the true dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.3 inches.)

This book is linguistically quite sound - the author clearly knows his linguistics and is not bogged down in "all languages are really Latin" or prescriptivist nonsense (which is my biggest pet peeve when it comes to language materials) - but it's not really sufficient for self-study. There are a few sample dialogues at the beginning, but after that, it's pretty much a straight grammar and not a textbook, with no texts longer than a sentence (and sentences only there to illustrate grammatical points in as concise a manner as possible), and lots of verb and noun inflection charts. Enough of that and my eyes glaze over; I really can't learn a language without corpora, and I assume the same is true for most people. It seems as if the author is more used to providing sketches of Mohawk grammar so that linguists can learn facts about its typology than providing enough examples and exercises so that people can learn to apply the rule he's talking about in all/most possible contexts.

The CD was also disappointing: its content is nothing more than the examples in the book, read multiple times with their English translation. This translates to the author reading pages and pages of verb conjugation charts out loud. Hearing it did help me internalize some of the phonology, and it is essential to hear how a language you want to learn is spoken. But it was still disappointing.

I think this book would be a fine supplement to another more comprehensive book (and an actual live class). But I'm not sure said more comprehensive book actually exists.

6. One Thousand Useful Mohawk Words, by David Kanatawakhon Maracle

This book is mostly a dictionary, with a few pages of grammar at the beginning. Strangely enough, the treatment of verb conjugation in this book is more comprehensive than that of the previous book. (I spent some gleeful linguistics-nerd time figuring out the morphophonological rules to derive the different forms of the subject agreement prefixes from an underlying form.) :)

Once again: I want more information. It's extremely disappointing to me how little material there is on the Mohawk language. (And I'm relatively lucky - a lot of Native American languages are much more endangered and less documented than Mohawk.) :(


Edit: I can't add a tag for the author because it would exceed the 1000 tag limit!
Edit 2: Fixed.