50books_poc | Entries tagged with non-fiction

A vivid and frank account of the crack cocaine era and a community’s ultimate resilience, told through a cast of characters whose lives illuminate the dramatic rise and fall of the epidemic.

No mini review for this one. I wouldn’t be able to do it justice. This was a very well researched and humanized take on the crack epidemic and the War on Drugs in the USA and how that disproportionately affected Black and Brown communities. Ramsey's writing was very accessible and the work outlined and contrasted different realities and perspectives extremely well.

Content warnings for: ( Read more... )

brainwane

I just read Notes From A Young Black Chef by Kwame Onwuachi with Joshua David Stein, thanks to this recommendation.

I enjoy chef memoirs -- The Apprentice by Jacques Pepin is a favorite and I've read it multiple times -- and this one definitely hit the spot. I appreciated getting the behind-the-scenes glimpses at different restaurants, including ones where I've eaten, and I appreciated the specifics of how different self-presentations, and sometimes lying, were instrumental to Onwuachi's steps on his career ladder.

Onwuachi is significantly younger than I am, and I found it edifying to get glimpses of how cell phones, social media, and related technologies have played different kinds of roles in his education than in mine.

Also, I rarely cook, and this book spurred me to get back in front of the stove!

brainwane

If you can get ahold of this idiosyncratic little memoir, it's pretty fun and light.

R.K. Narayan was a South Indian author, mostly of fiction, during the twentieth century. One year, in the 1950s, he travelled around the US (thanks to a Ford Foundation grant), and got two books out of it. One is The Guide, a novel about a tour guide. The other is My Dateless Diary, his diary of his travels from New York through Chicago, Berkeley, Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, and more.

He has a ton of wry observations about different bits of the US, comparisons to stuff back home in Mysore, conversations with celebrities (Greta Garbo and Aldous Huxley, for example), sitcom-esque misunderstandings, poignant conversations with strangers, etc. He runs into discrimination on a bus in the South, he has trouble finding vegetarian food, people keep asking him for spiritual advice and for his opinion of Nehru. And he drafts his book along the way and submits it to his publisher. He has fun, he runs into some worries and difficult situations but nothing ever goes deeply wrong, and his descriptions of various scrapes and angsts reminds me of Wodehouse.

brainwane

(I read this in 2013 and am copying this review from what I blogged then.)

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson: SO GOOD. READ THIS. Ta-Nehisi Coates agrees with me. Want to understand the US in the twentieth century? Want to think in real terms about exit, voice, and loyalty? Read Wilkerson's narrative history of black people who decided to stop putting up with Jim Crow and escaped from the US South (sometimes in the face of local sheriffs ripping up train tickets). Riveting, thought-provoking, and disquieting in the best way. My only nit to pick: I think if her editor had cut repetitions of things she's already told the reader, she coulda cut about 15 of the 500+ pages. But that's really minor, and as a scifi reader I'm accustomed to absorbing world-building at perhaps a higher clip than expected.

opusculasedfera

Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature by Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley
An academic survey of a wide variety of types of texts that discuss FF eroticism/love in the Caribbean. Her argument is that a queer/wlw culture has always existed in the various Caribbean islands and that there is a local language in which one can talk about it, refuting claims that queerness is something imposed by Europeans or North Americans onto Caribbean people. I personally found the anthropological work done on actual communities of queer women more compelling than some of the literary analysis (and I like literary analysis!), but Tinsley does a great job of demonstrating how it all fits together. (Also her usage and analysis of terminology for these groups of women is way more detailed and thoughtful than I'm achieving in this capsule review, but I'm using queer to get the general point across.)

Confronting Injustice: Social Activism in the Age of Individualism by Umair Muhammad
A short book discussing how we need systemic change to solve the big problems of our time rather than individual action (e.g. switching out our power plants as a whole rather than everyone using slightly less energy individually). Not terribly original, but not a bad overview, and it might be useful as a book to give people who were just edging into the topic for the first time, though you'd probably want them to be at least somewhat receptive to leftist ideas. A bit marred by an afterword to this second edition that mostly consists of complaining about bell hooks' lack of relevance to third world women, which is a bit rich from a guy who talks about Marx all the time and doesn't mention gender at all in his own analysis, but the author is quite young and I hope he will grow out of it.

Holy Wild by Gwen Benaway
A collection of poetry, mostly about the author's experiences as a First Nations trans woman in Canada (specifically she's Anishinaabe and Metis). I highly recommend it and I'm looking forward to her collection of essays that is to be published later this year, but definitely trigger warnings for sexual and colonial violence throughout.

Transgender China ed. Howard Chiang*
A collection of academic papers that each cover some aspect of cross-gender activity in Chinese history. The topics range from oral history conducted among trans people in modern Hong Kong, to analyses of classic literature with gender-bending characters, to a paper that argues quite convincingly that eunuchs in China have always been socially considered men rather than a third sex or a genderbent alternate sex as they are sometimes represented in Western historiography. Interesting stuff, though definitely aimed at specialists more than the general audience.

*My interpretation of the rules here is that this collection, which is edited by a Taiwanese man and features many Chinese authors, is eligible for the challenge. However, some of the authors included are white, so I'm willing to defer to the group if there's disagreement on this question.

tags: non-fiction, poetry, china, south asia, anishinaabe, metis, caribbean

opusculasedfera

I've been keeping up with the challenge, but very bad about posting it anywhere. Let's see if I can change that this year as people come back to dreamwidth, maybe? (Please?)

Brief reviews:

A Burst of Light and other essays by Audre Lorde
A reread of the always magnificent Audre Lorde. I needed her essay on the uses of anger in this extremely trying time.

The Occasional Vegetarian: 100 Delicious Dishes that Put Vegetables in the Center of the Plate by Elaine Louie
Some excellent sounding recipes, some mediocre sounding recipes. Billed to me by the library catalogue as containing more essay than recipe, it was definitely the other way around, but if you want something new to do with a vegetable, this has a broad approach and recipes from a wide variety of food traditions. Tends to ignore the fact that even vegetarians need PROTEIN and heartiness/substance is not the same thing, which always annoys me a bit.

Following Fish: One Man's Journey into the Food and Culture of the Indian Coast by Samanth Subramanian
One of those books where someone travels somewhere and eats something delicious and describes it well. A solid example of the genre. Contains some excellent descriptions of fish cookery and Indian scenery, and some parts of India I know very little about. I enjoyed it, and Subramanian is much more aware that he's describing a delicious fried fish, not a deep secret of politics/society/life than the title makes it sound, which keeps the book light and compelling. If anyone has any more recs in this genre, I would be delighted to receive them.

The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump by Michiko Kakutani
An exploration of various historical antecedents to our current state of anything-goes political lies. Depressing as hell, but very good at the thing that it's doing.

Myth=Mithya: Decoding Hindu Mythology by Devdutt Pattanaik
An explanation of several Hindu myths as well as the personages/symbols within them. It took me months to finish this quite short volume so I kept getting the many, many names confused, but I don't think that was the author's fault. Does a good job with some myths at straightforwardly explaining how the same myth gets used to tell different lessons in different communities, but with other ones I was left feeling like there was a definite slant to the story and I was wondering whose story it was. On the other hand, it's not supposed to be a comprehensive guide, just a starting point, and I know that I'm not especially knowledgeable on the subject.

Tags: sri lanka, japan, african-american, india, china, food/cooking, mythology, politics, history, essay, non-fiction

brainwane

Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy by Tressie McMillan Cottom (2017, The New Press) is simply excellent.

Here's an excerpt, here's Dr. McMillan Cottom's page about the book, here's her Twitter.

It's a book that makes scholarship accessible to a non-academic reader. It's a book that uses the author's experiences -- as a student, as an admissions sales rep, as a teacher, as a researcher, as a black woman, as a friend and daughter -- to vividly illustrate and bring the reader into theoretical understandings of systems, policy, and economic forces. It's sociology, it's investigative journalism, it's memoir, it's a lens on something I see every day (those subway/bus ads for education). It's witty and no-nonsense.

I thought I already knew that a lot of for-profit colleges were pretty bad. McMillan Cottom shows why they exist, why they are as they are, and what it'd take to change those forces. I understand the labor market better and I am now even more against mandatory degree requirements for job candidates. I understand the US student debt crisis better and understand why it's connected to the same forces that are making healthcare and retirement worse and worse in the US. Just to quote from the first few chapters (I captured many quotes because she makes so many great points):

As it turns out, there is such a thing as "bad" education. It is an educational option that, by design, cannot increase students' odds of beating the circumstances of their birth....

...the way we work shapes what kind of credentials we produce. If we have a shitty credentialing system, in the case of for-profit colleges, then it is likely because we have a shitty labor market. To be more precise, we have a labor market where the social contract between workers and the work on which college has previously relied has fundamentally changed and makes workers vulnerable.

While there is a lot of academic debate about the extent of that change and whether it signals progress or decline, there is substantial evidence that suggests all of those changes shift new risks to workers....

Whether you are a kindergarten teacher, an admissions counselor, or a college professor, working in education is a lot like being a priest. You shepherd people's collective faith in themselves and their trust in social institutions....

Despite our shift to understanding higher education as a personal good, we have held on to the narrative of all education being inherently good and moral. Economists E. Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson call this the education gospel: our faith in education as moral, personally edifying, collectively beneficial, and a worthwhile investment no matter the cost, either individual or societal....The contradiction is that we don't like to talk about higher education in terms of jobs, but rather in terms of citizenship and the public good, even when that isn't the basis of our faith....

Cross-posted review to my blog with another para or so about code schools and experimental programming retreats like the Recurse Center.

I read this book in February and it's on track to be the best book I read this year.

ayebydan

This is going to take me more than a year but I am determined to hit 50 eventually. So far this year I have 3 in the bag.

1: The Blind Man's Garden by Nadeem Aslam 3 ★
2: A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea by Masaji Ishikawa 4★
3: Baracoon by Zora Neale Hurston 4★

I would highly recommend Baracoon. It was written in the 30s and is the account of the last African captured by slavers and taken to the United States. Hurston was asked to edit his story into modern English and refused as she wanted his story to be as he spoke. It is only this month that the book is being published. I only wish it were longer.

emma_in_dream

This collection of journalistic essays about life as second generation Lebanese Australians is really interesting. It would be great for a school library as the collection is accessibly written and eclectically covers a variety of topics.

My only quibble is that some of the essays are about the experiences of the authors while others are the result of interviews but the essays are not marked to show this distinction. It would be helpful if there was a header on each essay giving a very general overview of who was interviewed.

seekingferret

21 India Calling by Anand Giridharadas

India Calling is a book I read as I tried to write Midnight's Children fanfiction, updating Rushdie's style for an India that has changed since that book was written thirty years ago. It is in some senses typical of a booming sub-genre of nonfiction works about "the New India", coming to grips with the rise of capitalism, the rise of economic and social and intellectual mobility, and all the associated changes those things bring with them. There are a lot of such books- Giridharadas comfortably situates himself within the subgenre by comparing his experiences to those reported in a few of them. As I ended up writing in my story, "Anyone with a pen and paper is writing that India doesn't have a story, and they will sell it to you if you give them the chance."

Giridharadas himself was the son of Indian immigrants to America who then moved back to India as an adult. His perspective is interesting. He's an outsider, but he speaks the language and knows intellectually the customs, so he can get past the exoticization that true Westerners visiting India often subject their readers to. But his perspective is still outsiderly. He feels comfortable reproaching native Indians for behaviors he finds misguided, but also spends a lot of time deconstructing his own mistaken assumptions about India- as backward, religiously intolerant, unambitious, and addicted to poverty and corruption. I really appreciated the humility he brought to his study.

Overall, I enjoyed the book, and though I don't think I ended up using any specific details from it in the fic, the sense he gave me of how India has evolved and how people feel about the evolution ended up being a major guiding force as I developed themes.

22 Dancers on the Shore by William M. Kelley

Kelley is a writer I would never have known about had I not literally googled for African-American literary novelists when I first started doing

50books_poc, about three and a half years ago, and discovering him is one of the things I am most grateful to this challenge for. He writes gracefully and complicatedly about the mid-20th-century African-American experience and at times the broader American experience. A Different Drummer, his debut novel, which was one of the first books I read for this challenge, remains one of my favorites.

Dancers on the Shore is a short story collection published not long after A Different Drummer, and it is more of a mixed bag, as short story collections often are. Some of the stories are a part of a roughly continuous family cycle that continues throughout Kelley's novels and culminates in the messy post-modern soup of Dunfords Travels Everywheres. Others are standalone. Some of them feel like early sketches added to fill up the book, while others are marvelous in the depth of character and emotion that Kelly is able to show in so little space.

Though all of his characters are African-American, explicit and even implicit discussions of racial politics are rare (the first page is an invocation from the author begging to be treated as an author instead of as an African-American author who has anything at all to say about the Race Question). The stories are mostly family dramas, characters discovering things about themselves and about the people close to them. A mother contemplates divorcing her husband. A son visits his extended family and learns about his father's childhood. A young woman contemplates an illegal abortion. Two old men endure retirement together. All of these subjects are handled with sensitivity and ambiguity.

23 Terminal Point by KM Ruiz

I loved the first book in Ruiz's Stryker Syndicate series of cyberpunky post-apocalyptic psionic action-adventures, but this one, the second, was more uneven. It was beautifully plotted and paced, and it had more of the great characters from the first book, but it stinted on setting. I knew I was in for a good show with Mind Storm from the first scene, which threw us on a train moving across the radioactive wasteland between the husk of Las Vegas and the husk oif Los Angeles. The location was so atmospheric, interesting, and real feeling that it intensified all of the action. Terminal Point bounces through a lot more locations, and a lot more exotic locations, but none of them feel as rich and real as the settings from the first book. Many of them have their interesting features infodumped at us rather than being allowed to present themselves naturally. The plot subordinated the world building, unfortunately, and the result was a book that offered satisfying resolution to open plots from the first book, but not a book that was as satisfying on its own terms.

alias_sqbr

I stopped counting books when I realised it was making reading feel like a chore. While I've read a lot of manga I realised I'd never read any novels by Japanese people, so I decided to make a special effort to do so.

Under the cut:
Meanwhile by Jason Shiga
Aya by Margauerite Aboue
The Manga Guide to Databases by Mana Takahashi
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya by Nagaru Tanigawa
Twelve Kingdoms: Shadow of the Moon by Fuyumi Ono
Harboiled and Hard Luck by Banana Yoshimoto

( Read more... )

ms-mmelissa.livejournal.com

Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas is a compulsively good read. Like Angelou's previous two biographies it's not very long, but the enthusiasm with which Angelou relates her experiences makes it seem even shorter. While her other biographies deal with childhood and her early steps towards independence, Angelou emerges here as a full-fledged adult become more confident with herself and the world around her.

The book covers two major themes, the first being Angelou's beginnings in show business. After her first marriage fails (the courtship, marriage and its dissolution are covered in a brisk few pages) Angelou takes a job as a dancer in a strip club. Her dances catch the attention of some white night club singers who help her begin a career as a nightclub singer which becomes a launching pad for her career as an actress and dancer. At last the Marguerite Johnson of the two previous memoirs transforms into Maya Angelou. A role in the renowned opera Porgy and Bess opens the world up to Angelou literally as well as metaphorically as the opera's tour allows her to visit Europe and parts of North Africa.

Wound inseparably into the narrative is Angelou's observations about what it is like to operate as a strong-minded independent black woman in America in the fifties. Segregation meant that her previous experiences with white people had been infrequent and hostile, but as she begins to travel in different circles her experiences with white people become more frequent and complex. Her family reacts badly when she marries a white man. Her white friends still have the power to unexpectedly wound her with a thoughtless comment and Angelou feels that power imbalance keenly. Her tour across Europe is also incredibly revealing to Angelou as she and the members of her company are often the first black people that people have seen in real life. The questions and stares give way to both painful moments and beautiful ones all of which Angelou recollects with grace and good humour.

pauraque

This book has been reviewed here several times, and I don't disagree with what others have said. Much of it is a beginner-level discussion of racism and privilege, though a notably clear and compassionate one with many striking analogies. (I particularly liked the image of racism as an airport moving sidewalk -- if you "do nothing", it carries you along. You have to actively walk the other way just to stay in one place, let alone get anywhere else.)

It seems aimed at people who may still be unsure about whether white privilege is real, and if it is, whether it's really that big of a deal. I think it could be a good way to ease in to the topic for someone who doesn't know where to start, especially because of the large amount of further reading Tatum suggests. It led me to add many titles to my list of books to look for.

( Read more... )

a: Tatum Beverly Daniel, African-American, non-fiction, race

pauraque

This book chronicles the history of cancer diagnosis and treatment from antiquity to the present day, and for being a fairly long book it was a damn quick read for me, because every bit of it was interesting. I was constantly looking for excuses to pick up the book and find out what would happen next. I learned an extraordinary number of things about cancer that I had no idea about before, particularly the latest theories on how it functions on a genetic level.

I have no medical background, but none was needed -- Mukherjee, an oncologist himself, has the gift of making science easy to understand without reducing it to vague analogies. ( Read more... )

a: Mukherjee Siddhartha, Indian-American, non-fiction, medicine

pauraque

What is Whiteness? Who is White?

These are questions that many people (and especially people who consider themselves white) never seriously ask, as though the category of whiteness is a natural one. It isn't, of course -- it's a socially constructed idea that has developed and changed considerably over many hundreds of years.

This book takes us through the history of that idea from its earliest known roots in antiquity, and ultimately goes on to focus mostly on Britain and the United States, where various different "white races" were long spoken of and ranked in value. The gradual incorporation of light-skinned people into one big group called White proceeded (and continues to proceed) in waves in the U.S., corresponding to waves of immigration, backlash against it, and an eventual admission that such-and-such a group is at last "American".

You've probably heard this phenomenon mentioned as a derailing tactic in discussions of race. ("Irish people were treated worse than black people") That is not what Painter is doing at all. She understands that the racialized ill treatment of white groups by other white groups does not erase anti-black racism -- it illuminates it! As the definition of who can be "white" has expanded over the centuries, it only sharpens the line between white people who might be able to become "just plain American" someday if they work hard and assimilate, and black people who, no matter what they do, never can.

( Read more... )

a: Painter Nell Irvin, African-American, non-fiction, history, race

Current Mood: awake

pauraque

This is a broad and wide-ranging introduction to Islam, and assumes the reader has no prior knowledge of the subject. (I didn't, so that worked for me.) A lot of time is spent on the origins and ancient history of the religion, including the cultural background of the region and how the very earliest Muslims lived and practiced their faith.

The middle section, after Muhammad's death but before the modern face of Islam had really arisen, kind of lost my attention. Too many names, dates, and battles, and I wasn't sure how it all fit together in the bigger picture. Aslan is knowledgeable but his style is pretty dry. I felt like asking if this was all going to be on the test.

Things picked up more when he got into discussion of the divisions between Sunni, Shi'a, Sufi, and their own subdivisions, and modern attempts to create Muslim states and how they've gone about it differently. This is where it really shows, though, that it's just a general introduction. It seemed he took on more than he could do justice to in a short-ish book. A number of interesting topics are brought up but then given only cursory treatment.

Aslan himself is a liberal Shi'ite, and he definitely puts forth his own views, not only on what Islam is, but on what it *ought* to be, religiously, culturally, and politically. I don't think arguing one's own position is bad -- it's certainly better than pretending to be neutral when you're not -- but again, the book seemed like it was being too many things at once. Is it a quick historical overview for beginners, or an argument for Islamic democracy, liberalism, and pluralism? It's both, and in a way that ultimately didn't read as cohesive for me.

tags: a: Aslan Reza, Iranian-American, Muslim, subject: Islam, genre: non-fiction

veleda-k.livejournal.com

The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson by Jo Ann Gibson Robinson.

( The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It )

The Bandit Queen of India: An Indian Woman's Amazing Journey From Peasant to International Legend by Phoolan Devi with Marie-Therese Cuny and Paul Rambali.

( The Bandit Queen of India )

pauraque

This is a teaching grammar of the language which is now more properly called Tohono O'odham. (It appears that later editions of the book are indeed called A Tohono O'odham Grammar. The edition I have is from 1997.) It's the language of the Tohono O'odham people, of what is now Arizona and northern Mexico. As of the year 2000 the language was fairly robust, with 10,000 speakers, 13% of them children, which is great. (Languages die quickly when children no longer learn them.)

Ofelia Zepeda is a native speaker and a linguist. She wrote this book to be used in the classroom, both for O'odham who lack full fluency, and for interested outsiders. The material is in the form of lessons, with discussion of the grammar, vocabulary lists, dialogues, and exercises. There are special advanced exercises for native speakers, challenging them to analyze their own speech and describe why certain constructions sound right and others do not, which is a cool addition and really drives home that the intended audience is the O'odham community itself.

The presentation is linguistically informed, but technical terms are largely avoided; there is nothing more exotic than the sorts of words you'd find in a high school language class. For me this made the book harder to read, not easier, but that's because linguistics is My Thing. I think the book does a good job of being accessible to people for whom linguistics is not Their Thing, while not being excessively dumbed-down.

The only potential snag is that the book doesn't stand on its own as a Teach-Yourself; it's obviously supposed to be a textbook for a class. The answers to the exercises are not provided. The phonology section is extremely sparse and vague, which is fine if you have people to hear and talk to, but not if you're trying to learn alone. Many of the finer points are under-explained (if you don't already know the difference between perfective and imperfective, I don't think you'll really know after reading this book either), and they're the kind of things your teacher would go over with you.

While I wouldn't rely on this book to teach you the language, it does cover quite a bit of ground for not being very long, so if you're the kind of person (like me) who reads about a language not because you're planning to speak it but simply because languages are awesome, it may well appeal to you. American Indian grammars written by native speakers aren't exactly a dime a dozen, so I was pleased to get my hands on this one.

tags: a: Zepeda Ofelia, Tohono O'odham, genre: non-fiction, subject: linguistics

pauraque

This book isn't long, but it took me a long time to read and a long time to digest. It's an academic work, not a popular one. Literary theory isn't my field, and some of the sections were too dense for me to understand, making heavy use of concepts I was unfamiliar with. But I believe Sarris's core message got through to me, and it was a message that moved and excited me greatly: When you hear or read a text, you are conversing with that text. You and the author are conversing. Your experiences and your cultures are conversing. Your reading/hearing experience is itself a creative act.

He expresses and illustrates this central theme through his own experiences of cultural intersection, starting with the Pomo women who raised him (his father was Miwok and Pomo, and his mother was white, but he never knew them), and the attempts of white academia to study these women, his family -- their storytelling, particularly.

( Read more... )

tags: a: Sarris Greg, Miwok, Pomo, genre: non-fiction, subject: American Indian literature, literary theory

emma-in-oz.livejournal.com

2.16 Larissa Behrendt, Achieving Social Justice: Indigenous Rights and Australia's Future (2003)

This is a very clear exploration of the debates over Indigenous rights in Australia, including a quite clear discussion of sovereignty.

I was left, as I always am, baffled by the common Australian perspective that Aboriginal people are constantly being given extra things, for nothing. Because, seriously, that in no way tallies with the fact that Aboriginal people are generally poorer, sicker, live in worse housing, etc, etc. How do these two, diametrically opposed ideas co-exist in their heads?