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50books_poc20. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
This is one of the most reviewed books at the comm and I don't have much more to say, just that I was really impressed by his writing. One of the quotes on the back cover said the memoir had the pacing of a novel and I found that to be true. I loved the way he would keep the story moving and even as he was talking about really complicated issues, and the way he would accomplish several things at once, like the scene where he goes into a barbershop in Chicago and is describing the scene, and his own place among the other men there, and at the same time recording the conversation and the black communities feeling about the election of Harold Washington. I recommend this book very highly.
21. Caille Millner, The Golden Road: Notes on My Gentrification
This is another memoir by a middle-class black writer who also grew up in an area with very few other black people, in this case San Jose, California, where her family started out in Chicano neighborhoods and later moved to the white suburbs. Millner then went to college at Harvard and afterward spent time in South Africa. I really liked it at first! I enjoyed Milner's writing style and her way of selecting telling details, like in this passage from the first chapter where she talks about going to church with her brother and walking past beggars on the front steps:
Millner says that her own identity as a person of color was informed by the experience of growing up among Chicanos, but her brother took this much further, becoming fluent in Spanish, getting a Ph.D. in Latin American studies, attending this church and even taking a Spanish last name. And looking at it from the outside she was more able than him to see that his Latino friends generally liked him but that they would always consider him an outsider because of his race, and to some extent they'd see him as presumptuous for knowing more about parts of their culture than they did themselves. (This was really interesting for me to read as a white person who's also spent a lot of time studying Spanish and Latin American culture and eventually had to come to terms with the fact that, no, I'm not Latina and never will be.) The sections I liked best were these where she was writing about things she observed and experienced herself.
Two things bothered me about this book and eventually caused me to have trouble getting through it. One is sort of a trivial stylistic thing: she would write about a lot of different people telling their stories, and all their voices sounded the same (just like Millner's own voice as a writer and not like a real person speaking out loud) and were written in first person without quotation marks. I occasionally found this confusing (is the "I" in the sentence Millner or the person monologuing at her?) but mostly just unnatural and annoying, especially as she was talking about all these very different people from different parts of the world; it made me feel like I was reading the same thing over and over even though the content was actually different.
The other problem is something more serious but harder to explain. I just felt like each chapter had a point, something that Millner felt very strongly about and was trying to communicate, but that she didn't actually get around to saying. It would be like, "This was the point in my life when everything changed" and then she would write about the moment but not the actual realization she had at that moment or the way it changed her life. I just felt like there was something missing.
22. Patricia Raybon, My First White Friend: Confessions on Race, Love, and Forgiveness
This was the book I liked least of the four I'm reviewing here, though I did learn things and am glad I read it. Raybon is from an older generation than Obama or Millner and because of that I found that her experience was a little more familiar from other things I'd read, and yet slightly less relevant for understanding race relations as they are today.
Her chapters are organized around different themes rather than telling her life story in chronological order as Obama did, but it's still mostly about personal experiences. Some of the things she talks about are being the one black kid (and eventually finding the one white friend of the title) when her family moved to the suburbs of Denver; teaching journalism to mostly white students and the pressure of feeling judged by them; finding strength from her faith and from the black church; and colorism within the African American community and especially among middle-class women. She writes very honestly about her own feelings toward her husbands and children, for example her distress when her second daughter was born with very light skin, and how this made her rethink her own identity as a proud black woman.
As with Millner, I was interested in what Raybon had to say but got a little annoyed with some of her stylistic choices, in this case her tendency to write a lot of really short sentences and paragraphs. For example, the book opens like this:
This gave me a feeling of "What I have to say is important. Really. You should listen." And of course it is important and that many short sentences would have been fine for a few paragraphs or, say, a newspaper column (Raybon is a journalist), but didn't work for me when it was used so much throughout the whole book.
23. Best African American Essays: 2009
Gerald Early, series editor, and Debra J. Dickerson, guest editor
This is the first volume of what's intended to be an annual series, along the lines of Best American Essays, although it's put out by a different publisher. The companion volume is Best African American Fiction: 2009. I happened to run across this in the African American Studies section at a bookstore, which was lucky for me though I realized later it was kind of messed up, since according to Debra Dickerson's introduction part of the point was to provide a space for writing that's informed by the African American experience but not necessarily about race or racism. She talks about how black journalists and intellectuals get called to talk on the news whenever a racial incident comes up but don't get thought about for other subjects, and she wants to say, yes, we are black and that's important, but we can also talk about sailing or about art or about Judaism, just like any other writer can.
The collection has some big names like Walter Mosley, Michael Eric Dyson, and even Barack Obama, but there's a whole lot of variety and pieces from some very small magazines and local newspapers.
I enjoyed this book a lot, though I found it to be somewhat uneven and wished for a little more editing. There were a few articles that made me think, okay, it would have been fine to come across this in a magazine, but I wasn't too impressed with them as essays. There was also a really interesting series of three pieces by the newspaper journalist Bill Maxwell about the experience of teaching English and journalism at a small Historically Black College in Alabama. There was a lot of repetition between the three parts, which made sense when they were published over three weeks in a newspaper but was a little tedious when you were reading them one after another in a book.
Some of my favorites were Dickerson's introduction, Emily Bernard's piece about the end of a friendship, Gerald Early's about movies, Malcolm Gladwell's about IQ tests, and the articles in the sections called "Gay" and "Internationally Black". In particular I was fascinated by Emily Raboteau's "Searching for Zion", the longest in the collection, a personal essay about black people and Jews in the United States and in Israel. The last section was about politics and I found most of the pieces in it to be a bit boring and lacking in subtlety, but I guess they could be good as a record of things people were writing about in the run-up to the Obama election and more interesting to look back on in a few years.
Anyway, I also recommend this book, not necessarily for reading cover to cover but at least as something to check out, and I'm looking forward to seeing other volumes in the series.
This is one of the most reviewed books at the comm and I don't have much more to say, just that I was really impressed by his writing. One of the quotes on the back cover said the memoir had the pacing of a novel and I found that to be true. I loved the way he would keep the story moving and even as he was talking about really complicated issues, and the way he would accomplish several things at once, like the scene where he goes into a barbershop in Chicago and is describing the scene, and his own place among the other men there, and at the same time recording the conversation and the black communities feeling about the election of Harold Washington. I recommend this book very highly.
21. Caille Millner, The Golden Road: Notes on My Gentrification
This is another memoir by a middle-class black writer who also grew up in an area with very few other black people, in this case San Jose, California, where her family started out in Chicano neighborhoods and later moved to the white suburbs. Millner then went to college at Harvard and afterward spent time in South Africa. I really liked it at first! I enjoyed Milner's writing style and her way of selecting telling details, like in this passage from the first chapter where she talks about going to church with her brother and walking past beggars on the front steps:
St. Augustine's was a brown church, upwardly mobile but still brown, a church that was less than one generation removed from poverty, a church with second mortgages on homes in Echo Park, a church that sent half its ages to Mexico, a church that wore twice-ironed whites. It was a church with a fierce anxious expression that had solidified while watching parents and brothers and friends rise at four in the morning for gardening jobs in Orange County. This was a church that knew how close it was to the squalor outside. A chruch that knew how dangerous it was to linger on the front steps.
Millner says that her own identity as a person of color was informed by the experience of growing up among Chicanos, but her brother took this much further, becoming fluent in Spanish, getting a Ph.D. in Latin American studies, attending this church and even taking a Spanish last name. And looking at it from the outside she was more able than him to see that his Latino friends generally liked him but that they would always consider him an outsider because of his race, and to some extent they'd see him as presumptuous for knowing more about parts of their culture than they did themselves. (This was really interesting for me to read as a white person who's also spent a lot of time studying Spanish and Latin American culture and eventually had to come to terms with the fact that, no, I'm not Latina and never will be.) The sections I liked best were these where she was writing about things she observed and experienced herself.
Two things bothered me about this book and eventually caused me to have trouble getting through it. One is sort of a trivial stylistic thing: she would write about a lot of different people telling their stories, and all their voices sounded the same (just like Millner's own voice as a writer and not like a real person speaking out loud) and were written in first person without quotation marks. I occasionally found this confusing (is the "I" in the sentence Millner or the person monologuing at her?) but mostly just unnatural and annoying, especially as she was talking about all these very different people from different parts of the world; it made me feel like I was reading the same thing over and over even though the content was actually different.
The other problem is something more serious but harder to explain. I just felt like each chapter had a point, something that Millner felt very strongly about and was trying to communicate, but that she didn't actually get around to saying. It would be like, "This was the point in my life when everything changed" and then she would write about the moment but not the actual realization she had at that moment or the way it changed her life. I just felt like there was something missing.
22. Patricia Raybon, My First White Friend: Confessions on Race, Love, and Forgiveness
This was the book I liked least of the four I'm reviewing here, though I did learn things and am glad I read it. Raybon is from an older generation than Obama or Millner and because of that I found that her experience was a little more familiar from other things I'd read, and yet slightly less relevant for understanding race relations as they are today.
Her chapters are organized around different themes rather than telling her life story in chronological order as Obama did, but it's still mostly about personal experiences. Some of the things she talks about are being the one black kid (and eventually finding the one white friend of the title) when her family moved to the suburbs of Denver; teaching journalism to mostly white students and the pressure of feeling judged by them; finding strength from her faith and from the black church; and colorism within the African American community and especially among middle-class women. She writes very honestly about her own feelings toward her husbands and children, for example her distress when her second daughter was born with very light skin, and how this made her rethink her own identity as a proud black woman.
As with Millner, I was interested in what Raybon had to say but got a little annoyed with some of her stylistic choices, in this case her tendency to write a lot of really short sentences and paragraphs. For example, the book opens like this:
God help me.
I stopped hating white people on purpose about a year ago. I didn't tell anybody. I couldn't. If I did, I would have to explain how I started hating in the first place. And I really didn't know then myself.
I just hated.
This gave me a feeling of "What I have to say is important. Really. You should listen." And of course it is important and that many short sentences would have been fine for a few paragraphs or, say, a newspaper column (Raybon is a journalist), but didn't work for me when it was used so much throughout the whole book.
23. Best African American Essays: 2009
Gerald Early, series editor, and Debra J. Dickerson, guest editor
This is the first volume of what's intended to be an annual series, along the lines of Best American Essays, although it's put out by a different publisher. The companion volume is Best African American Fiction: 2009. I happened to run across this in the African American Studies section at a bookstore, which was lucky for me though I realized later it was kind of messed up, since according to Debra Dickerson's introduction part of the point was to provide a space for writing that's informed by the African American experience but not necessarily about race or racism. She talks about how black journalists and intellectuals get called to talk on the news whenever a racial incident comes up but don't get thought about for other subjects, and she wants to say, yes, we are black and that's important, but we can also talk about sailing or about art or about Judaism, just like any other writer can.
The collection has some big names like Walter Mosley, Michael Eric Dyson, and even Barack Obama, but there's a whole lot of variety and pieces from some very small magazines and local newspapers.
I enjoyed this book a lot, though I found it to be somewhat uneven and wished for a little more editing. There were a few articles that made me think, okay, it would have been fine to come across this in a magazine, but I wasn't too impressed with them as essays. There was also a really interesting series of three pieces by the newspaper journalist Bill Maxwell about the experience of teaching English and journalism at a small Historically Black College in Alabama. There was a lot of repetition between the three parts, which made sense when they were published over three weeks in a newspaper but was a little tedious when you were reading them one after another in a book.
Some of my favorites were Dickerson's introduction, Emily Bernard's piece about the end of a friendship, Gerald Early's about movies, Malcolm Gladwell's about IQ tests, and the articles in the sections called "Gay" and "Internationally Black". In particular I was fascinated by Emily Raboteau's "Searching for Zion", the longest in the collection, a personal essay about black people and Jews in the United States and in Israel. The last section was about politics and I found most of the pieces in it to be a bit boring and lacking in subtlety, but I guess they could be good as a record of things people were writing about in the run-up to the Obama election and more interesting to look back on in a few years.
Anyway, I also recommend this book, not necessarily for reading cover to cover but at least as something to check out, and I'm looking forward to seeing other volumes in the series.
