50books_poc | Entries tagged with memoir

seekingferret.livejournal.com

32) Tempting Faith by David Kuo

Kuo wrote this book after leaving the Bush White House Office of Faith Based Initiatives, where he worked from 2001-2003. It's a memoir of his experience mixing politics and religion from his teenage years through his service in the White House.

It follows the standard narrative of politics corrupting the idealist, but features a few fascinating revelations as well as some stirring passages. Kuo's experience before the White House was largely as a speechwriter, for Bill Bennett, Ralph Reed, John Ashcroft, and others. My favorite passage:

The lesson soon led to another, much bigger one, about the role of government in caring for America's soul. For years a national debate had raged over whether America was falling apart morally and culturally. Like so many other Christian conservatives, I knew the answer: absolutely. New policies, new strategies, and political leaders were needed to help us reclaim America's greatness. On 9/12 I discovered something else.

At the time, I was put in charge of assisting "all" of America's charities and mobilizing "all" of America's religious groups, a task that both highlighted the White House-centric view of the world and showed how desperately we all wanted to help. Our office developed a massive list of ideas and plans: we planned candlelight services and telethons and moments of silence. Then we discovered the obvious. People were doing all of those things on their own. They didn't need us to do it. America didn't need anyone else to rally it. It rallied itself. The American soul wasn't sick.

The big revelation for me was that Kuo was involved in the development of a particularly insidious speechwriting technique, wherein a politically moderate speaker would insert figures from the Gospels in their speeches in order to communicate to evangelical voters, in code, that he was one of them. Kuo suggests that in the case of some of the speakers he used the trick for, like Jack Kemp, the speakers weren't even aware of the significance of the coded phrases. Talk about shibboleths.

I wish I had the sense that Kuo had deconstructed his belief that just because a person loves Jesus, their heart must be in the right place. It leads to some puzzling passages where he is trying to denounce some action of Bush's while insisting that his heart was in the right place. I leave the book unclear if Kuo recognizes the problem with this logic.

tags: memoir, non-fiction, politics, a: kuo david, chinese-american

kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com

Title: When I Was Puerto Rican
Author: Esmeralda Santiago
Number of Pages: 274 pages
My Rating: 5/5

This is Esmeralda Santiago's memoir of growing up in Puerto Rico and moving to New York at age thirteen. It ends with her about to start high school and I assume the second of her three memoirs picks up from there. I'm eager to read it. I'm sure it will be as well-written and engaging as this was.

rachelmanija.livejournal.com

Mourning his mother’s death and suffering from midlife crisis, food fanatic Simon Majumdar decides to eat his way around the world for a year. The result is an uneven but always entertaining episodic memoir of his adventures. At worst, it’s perfunctorily written and peppered with national stereotyping (“with typical Latin-American machismo...”) At best, as when he writes about his food-obsessed Welsh-Bengali family or provides precisely detailed snapshots of people he meets on the way, it’s funny and sweet.

He visited a number of places I’m familiar with, giving me that “HI BOB!” feeling one gets when one sees a movie shot in one’s hometown, though he usually went off on some path that didn’t touch on what I expected him to write about: in Santa Cruz he spends the entire trip having Thanksgiving dinner at someone’s house, and in Hong Kong he seeks out obscure restaurants only to invariably find that Anthony Bourdain got there first. (Hate to tell you, Simon, but Anthony Bourdain also visited the yakitori joints in Ueno that you enjoyed so much.) I was amused to note that in Xi’an he too was dragged to the touristy dumpling restaurant that shapes the dumplings into walnuts, geese, goldfish, etc – and since he did not say one word about their flavor, I assume he too was underwhelmed.

It’s not a great food memoir, but it is a fun one.

Eat My Globe: One Year to Go Everywhere and Eat Everything

sumofparts.livejournal.com

20. West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story by Tamim Ansary

( Cut for length )

rachelmanija.livejournal.com

A childhood/teenage memoir of growing up in Harlem during the 1940s and 1950s, focusing on Myers’ family and neighborhood, his early attempts at writing, and the pervasive racism that slowly poisons his life and dreams.

Myers’ relaxed, warm style and deadpan humor make this easy reading, though I suspect that the episodic structure and lack of emphasis on the moments of conventional action would appeal more to adults than to teenagers.

Bad Boy: A Memoir

whereweather.livejournal.com

#25. This Bridge Called My Back, ed. Cherríe Moraga & Gloria Anzaldúa
1981/'83, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press

This is another book that is so full of... ideas and thinking and newness, and that has so many visions and so much emotion in it, and that contains both so much I can identify with and so much that seems deeply foreign -- I don't mean only the experiences and attitudes of the women who wrote it, but also, which is harder for me to assimilate, the lens through which they view the world: the moment of history, cultural and political, in which thy formulated these ideas and these manifestoes -- that I feel overwhelmed when I try to think about posting a review of it.

But I also feel kind of like a coward for backing out of reviewing it. What to do? I think I will let it simmer for a while. I may also read the much more recent companion book to it (this bridge we call home, used, I see, as an icon for this group ;), and see if that helps me understand, and bridge the thirty years of historical difference between these women and me.

[tags I would add if I could: assimilation, sociology, spirituality [or: religion/spirituality], puerto rican, a: morales rosario, a: rushin donna kate, a: wong nellie, a: lee mary hope, a: littlebear naomi, a: lim genny, a: yamada mitsuye, a: valerio anita, a: cameron barbara, a: levins morales anita, a: carillo jo, a: daniels gabrielle, a: moschkovich judit, a: davenport doris, a: gossett hattie, a: smith barbara, a: smith beverly, a: clarke cheryl, a: noda barbara, a: woo merle, a: quintanales mirtha, a: anzaldua gloria, a: alarcon norma, a: combahee river collective, a: canaan andrea, a: parker pat]

(Also, apropos of nothing: Whoo! Halfway through! This book feels like an appropriate one for that milestone.)

fiction-theory.livejournal.com

Title: Colors of the Mountain
Author: Da Chen (DaChen.org)
Genre: Non-fiction
Page Count: 320 pages
Publisher: Anchor

( Review: Colors of the Mountain )

rachelmanija.livejournal.com

After Satrapi leaves Iran at the end of Persepolis 1, she begins a new life in Vienna as an immigrant alone in a foreign land. This is a more familiar story, at least to me, than that of growing up during and after a revolution. But not only is it just as witty and well-observed and poignant as the first book, this one too is full of the sort of surprising turns that a real life takes, even without a revolution.

I don’t want to give away too much of the story. But I have to mention the moment when punk teenage Satrapi is huddled nervously on a couch at a party when she hears sex moans from another room: “Ah! Ah! Ah!” Freaking out, she grabs a book to distract herself, but she can read nothing on its pages but “Ah! Ah! Ah!”

Satrapi’s very solid relationship with her family is even more central to this book, where they are largely separated, than in the last one where they lived together. Despite her encounters with racism, loneliness, political oppression, and, eventually, a complete emotional breakdown, that gives this coming of age story a reassuring overlay: with a family like that, she’s sure to find herself eventually.

Recommended.

See it on Amazon: Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

Both parts together: The Complete Persepolis

fiction-theory.livejournal.com

Title: Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among the Ghosts
Author: Maxine Hong Kingston (Maxine Hong Kingston @ Wikipedia)
Genre: Nonfiction
Page Count: 224 pages
Publisher: Vintage International (reprint)

( Review: Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among the Ghosts. With intersectionality scores. )

rachelmanija.livejournal.com

A memoir in graphic novel form about growing up in Iran during the revolution.

I avoided reading this for a long time because I had the impression that it was one of those worthy, educational, depressing books which are read more for their medicinal benefit than for enjoyment. (Perhaps because reviews often began "This is a very important book.") Those are certainly valuable and necessary, but not often to my personal taste.

I had somehow missed any mention of the fact that Persepolis is extremely funny as well as dark, and not earnestly improving at all. It’s actually in a completely different tradition, that of the memoir of two brutal experiences – war and the less-than-happy childhood – which often inspire black comedy. The other thing I didn’t expect was an odd bit of personal resonance: both Satrapi and I come from Communist families. I only wish that, like her, I had been given comic books on dialectical materialism.

The deceptively simple art meshes with the deceptively simple writing to create a perfect recreation of her child’s eye view, to which she and we bring our own adult perspective. Very funny, very dark, precisely observed, poignant, and witty. I couldn’t stop reading this, and I highly recommend it.

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

26. Faith Adiele, Meeting Faith: The Forest Journals of a Black Buddhist Nun

Faith is the daughter of a Swedish mother and a Nigerian father; she grew up in a small town in the Midwest. She is smart, motivated, and involved, and her drive to succeed gets her a scholarship to Harvard, where she is involved in social work in addition to her classes.

And the pressure quickly causes her to fail and drop out.

This book is a memoir, mainly focusing on the time Faith spent in Thailand, where after leaving Harvard she went to work on an Anthropological research project about the status of women, particularly Buddhist nuns. Faith eventually decides to live as a nun herself for a season. The book jumps around in time a great deal, following a chapter about daily life as a nun with one about Faith's childhood, and then with another about prostitutes in Thailand's big cities. This style sometimes made things a little hard to follow, but it also was great for focusing on thematic issues instead of narrative. Another thing I disliked was that the book is published in a style that has quotes from scholars, Buddhist practitioners, and Faith's journal along the edges of the pages, making it look more like a textbook than a memoir.

However, I did like this book a lot. It's written in a style that accommodates both people who know nothing about Thailand or Buddhism with those who have more knowledge. Faith's comparison of the pressure and the succeed/fail mentality of Western culture against the more internal processes of Thai Buddhism are also pretty insightful, although they can be a bit simplistic at times. I really enjoyed her descriptions of meditation and mindfulness. She is a very vivid writer, and very readable. I really enjoyed this book.

Also recommended: If anyone is looking for more recommendations of books by POC, I really liked this podcast/blog post. Three African-American women talk about books they like. Not all the books mentioned have POC authors, but many do. Plus, though I'd never listened to this podcast before I stumbled on it today, these guys are really funny.

Current Mood: lazy

teaotter.livejournal.com

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.

vegablack62.livejournal.com

The Color of Water: A black man's tribute to his white mother.
James McBride.

James McBride's mother, a white Jewish girl who grew up in the Segregated South, went over to the black side, as she put it. She had a romance with a young black man at a time and in a place where that could mean death and ultimately moved to Harlem, married a black man in 1942, embraced his faith, married another after the first died and raised twelve black children. A strong personality who described herself as light skinned, she was a woman of faith and practicality and driving belief in education who raised her children to see themselves as black Christians in a largely hostile white world and pushed them to succeed in that world.

McBride places his own memories of growing up next to his mother's monologue about her own life. This is very effective. Both stories are interesting and engaging and illuminate each other, encouraging thoughtful reflection on race, class, religion, identity, family, and the effects of abuse. I loved the depiction of both McBride's father and stepfather. The nuances in McBride's picture of his mother's family that he gained by his research was also quite interesting. The book is full of powerful personalities that I wanted to know more about, especially his older brothers and sisters and their activities for the civil rights movement.

There's a lot I could quote from the book, but I found one paragraph that shines a quick light on the way white and black relate in this country and on the life and personality of McBride's mother herself. She had been hurt by the new minister of the church that she and her husband had founded forty years before. He had "treated her like an outsider, a foreigner, a white person, greeting her after the service with the obsequious smile and false sincerity that blacks reserve for white folks when they don't know them well or don't trust them, or both.... Ma was so hurt she resolved never to go back there again, a promise she broke again and again, braving the two-hour subway and train commute from her home in Ewing, New Jersey, to sit in church, the only white person in the room, a stranger in the very church that she started in her living room."

I thought this was a great read.

ETA: I found this quote on Wikipedia which amused me: "I thought it would be received well in the black community but it's sold much better in the white Jewish community," he said. "Most of my readers are middle-age, white, Jewish women...."

vegablack62.livejournal.com

Ayann Hirsi Ali's memoir Infidel is first off a very compelling and engaging read. She writes well and knows how to tell her story. What's more she has had a fascinating life. I was expecially interested in her description of her childhood and family history in Somalia. Her grandmother and her own mother were both strong dominating women who at times abused her, at other times pushed her into being strong herself, even as they enforced the restrictive rules of their religion and culture. Her mother is a fascinating and tragic character. She traveled to a city from the countryside as a young girl where she embreaced both education, and modernity and a fiercely conservative Islam.

Ayann Ali herself embraced both at times the liberal carefuly considered Islam of her father, the conservative Islam of the Moslem Brotherhood, and finally the Atheism that she discovered in school in the Netherlands. (Interesting I found her reactions to Holland and to Atheism very similar to her mother's to modern urban life and Wahabiism.) I enjoyed reading this and for those who disagree with her I would say that this is her take on her own life and not anothers.

sanguinity

58. Kip Fulbeck, Paper Bullets: a fictional autobiography.

I loved this a lot. Kip Fulbeck's background as a spoken-word artist is very prominent in Paper Bullets: this is a man who knows how to tell a story, how to pace it, how to deliver it, how to catch up his audience and seduce them. And these are good stories, too. I enjoy a lot of what I read, but I don't savor that many books; Paper Bullets is one I savored.

59. Kip Fulbeck, part asian, 100% hapa.

What are you?

100-some individuals, each photographed very simply against a white background; each photograph is faced with the subject's hand-written, free-form answer to the question "What are you?" Some people write several paragraphs, others come back with a one-liner ("Shouldn't you be asking my name, first?"); school-age kids draw pictures; toddlers scribble. The so-called "official" answer to said question, the list of each individual's ethnic heritages, is typewritten up in the corner, but the "official" answer is always dwarfed by the handwriting and the direct gazes. If you're kinda starved for representations of mixed people (which I am), this is all kinds of awesome.

Cons: White-Asian mixes predominate, even though some individuals are Asian-Asian, Asian-Black, or other mixes. Additionally, fully a third of Paul Spickard's afterword is a defense of the Asian-American appropriation of "hapa". (And not a very good defense, in my mind: language changes, we're using the word respectfully.)

Samples from the book (different layout than in the book, but same images/info) are available on the website.

rachelmanija.livejournal.com

A memoir of the author’s teenage years in India during WWII. Rau and her older sister grew up in London, but returned to Bombay with their mother when their diplomat father was stationed in South Africa. (They tried living in South Africa, but her mother packed them up when she went to a movie theatre and found a sign reading “Indians, natives, and dogs are not allowed.”)

It’s hard to review this in a way that differentiates it from the many other books about people grappling with cultural identity and loyalty during a return to their homeland after a long separation. I did particularly like this one, though. It’s not primarily a comedy, but there are many funny bits, often involving her deadpan sister and a grandfather who reinvents Descartes via musings on the existence or nonexistence of the Indian sweet on his plate. Rau’s ear for dialogue is as sharp as her observation of a country and cultures she’s more or less encountering as a newcomer, as she had left India when she was six.

Unsurprisingly, she gets involved in the political scene. Her mother is a friend of the politician and poet Sarojini Naidu, who comes across particularly vividly, reigning over a dinner party in a blouse printed with the cover of her favorite book! She also meets Nehru a couple of times. Rau captures the excitement of the political scene, as friends often call up to apologize in advance for missing dinner parties, as they’ve decided to get arrested for civil disobedience instead.

The book was published in 1944, when Rau was about 21. It feels very immediate, with little mediation by hindsight. Her thoughts on politics and identity are honest and serious: you can see her growing up intellectually as the book progresses.

But though the content is weighty, the touch is light. It’s a quick, easy, enjoyable read. I was not surprised to learn that Rau became quite a successful writer, author of a number of books and the film version of A Passage To India.

View on Amazon: Home to India (Perennial library)

rachelmanija.livejournal.com

A collection of essays, many autobiographical. If you’re interested in Amy Tan and writing, this is a must-read. If you dislike her fiction, I hesitate to recommend this; the style and most of the topics not focused on writing are quite similar. I do generally like her fiction and I am interested in writing, so I enjoyed this.

A number of the most powerful and poignant stories focus on her remarkably eventful and often traumatic life, the equally eventful and traumatic life of her mother, and their difficult relationship. (Difficult is putting it mildly: when Tan was a teenager, her mother, who was frequently suicidal, held a cleaver to Tan’s throat.) I hadn’t realized quite how autobiographical some of her fiction was until I read this book.

I also enjoyed most of the pieces on writing. Tan is quite funny about detailing the neurosis-beset life of the writer. In more serious matters, she has several essays about the expectations put on her as a Chinese-American writer (she dislikes the term “writer of color”), both from white people and from people of color. Her essays on the matter are heartfelt and worth reading even if you totally disagree with some or all of her opinions, which are too complex to summarize here.

The last essay, about a mysterious chronic illness she develops which causes a cascade of horrifying symptoms which eventually include hallucinations, is both a compelling medical detective story and a good conclusion to the book, though I was not fond of her attempt to pull in 9/11, which occurred at the same time. (Moral: if no one knows what’s wrong with you and you have bizarre symptoms, online research is the next best thing to Dr. House.)

Like most essay collections, there’s some randomness and a couple of pieces that could have been dropped with no harm to the book. But it’s a strong collection overall.

whereweather.livejournal.com

A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid
1988. Farrar, Straus and Giroux

I am a fan of Jamaica Kincaid. In the last year or so I have read her books At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, and Lucy, and got a lot out of each of them. I was looking forward to reading A Small Place because I was looking forward to learning more about Antigua, the Caribbean island she comes from. (Both Annie John and At the Bottom of the River are set on Antigua, but since they are pretty much in the mind of a first-person narrator, who is usually a child, there is not the kind of distance that you'd need to be _told about_ Antigua -- the kind of political, historical, or sociological things about it that might be interesting to a grown-up North American reader.)

I am disappointed in A Small Place, partly because... I'm not sure what the book wants to be. I've seen it described as a "travelogue," and also as a "jeremiad." The first section, or chapter (like many of Kincaid's books, it is very short: 80 pages of large, clear print), starts off in second-person: it is telling "you," the traveller, what to expect when you arrive in Antigua. The next two sections are in first person, with many recollections of Kincaid's early life in Antigua, which move out and away to analysis of what the problems of the island are (the second section considers mostly colonialism and slavery, the third the island's desperate political corruption.) There is also a very short fourth section, which feels sort of tacked on for closure.

I guess I feel as if the book is not very tight or well-held together, in spite of its size -- and a small book needs that even more, doesn't it? Although her fiction is also full of digressions, I feel as if they work and shape to a larger whole. A Small Place is strangely imbalanced, though: analysis, personal recollection, anger carrying the writer away.. Part of the issue, maybe, is that she seems to sort of be writing around or even trying to get at certain ideas and concepts which have, I think, been formulated more concisely and forcefully by various other post-colonialist theorists and writers. But Kincaid does not want to seem to avail herself of any of that language or intellectual discourse, and so it feels as if she is lurching at things and coming up short. (It feels odd and audacious to level this criticism at Jamaica Kincaid, whose intellect is profound and formidable and whose writing sometimes borders on genius. But nonetheless, that is how the book made me feel.)

( Despite that, there were entire passages I want to copy out to think about and remember. )

sanguinity

(Maybe if I do a bunch of mini-reviews, I'll have a chance of catching up?)

51. Keith Black, MD, Brain Surgeon: A Doctor's Inspiring Encounters with Mortality and Miracles.

This one works best, I think, if you think of it as an extended dinner table conversation. The writing style is somewhat clunky, but the man does have good stories to tell, and I learned quite a bit about brain tumors, brain surgery, cancer treatment, cancer research, and the various concerns one weighs when deciding whether to cut or not. (Which sounds as if it might be dull, when I list it out like that. Except that it's very much not.)

52. Michael Cunningham & Craig Marberry, Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats.

Oo. Lovely photos of women in their church hats, interleaved with reminisces from the women themselves about... the hats, their families, their churches, their communities. Lots of handsome photos, lots of gorgeous moments from people's lives. Go look.

53. William L. Iġġiaġruk Hensley, Fifty Miles from Tomorrow : A Memoir of Alaska and the Real People.

"Alaska is my identity, my home, and my cause. I was there, after all, before Gore-Tex replaced muskrat and wolf skin in parkas, before moon boots replaced mukluks, before the gas drill replaced the age-old tuuq we used to dig through five feet of ice to fish. I was there before the snow machine, back when the huskies howled their eagerness to pull the sled. I was there before the outboard motor showed up, when the qayaq and umiaq glided silently across the water, and I was there when the candle and the Coleman lamp provided all the light we needed."

Memoir of a Native Alaskan activist and politician who was instrumental in the preservation of the Native Alaskan land base. I would be hard-pressed to sum this up, but the first half is a very engaging depiction of Hesley's childhood community and its lifestyle, while the second half is the stressful emotional rollercoaster of trying to make sure that Alaska's newly-created state government, in combination with the federal government, didn't claim all of Alaska's land for themselves, corporate interests, and non-Native immigrants. There was a lot of cool and interesting stuff in here, but a lot of it you get just a glimpse of -- Hensley has had a very rich life, and one book isn't nearly enough to discuss it all.

rachelmanija.livejournal.com

A memoir about Japanese-American author Mori’s visit to her hometown of Kobe and other parts of Japan many years after her family was shattered by her mother’s suicide. Mori spends time with her dysfunctional family, tries to understand her long-dead mother, and grapples with her own cultural identity.

Well-written and thoughtful, but also a bit emotionally distant and with little variety of tone. I wasn’t bowled over, but my taste tends more toward brightly colored passions and humor than to delicate understatement. If you are more inclined to the latter, you would probably like it more. It did get rave reviews.

Check it out on Amazon: The Dream of Water