50books_poc | Entries tagged with united states

From the acclaimed author of All Her Little Secrets comes yet another gripping, suspenseful novel where, after the murder of a white man in Jim Crow Mississippi, two Black sisters run away to different parts of the country. . . but can they escape the secrets they left behind?

I think I had a case of mismatched expectations with this one. I thought it'd be more of a mystery plot instead of a historical one, but I still very much enjoyed the writing style--it was very accessible and the fast pace kept me engaged the entire time.

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wearing_tearing

A Black sheriff. A serial killer.
A small town ready to combust.

I had a little trouble with the writing at first, but quickly got sucked into Titus' perspective and the town of Charon. He was such an interesting and complex character and it was an unique experience to read this story through his eyes considering the themes it addressed.

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wearing_tearing

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.

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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.

cesy

Black No More by George Schuyler is early sci-fi about race. I found it very much in the style of its era rather than modern pacing and readability, but really good. It does the thought-provoking thought experiment on society that a certain type of speculative fiction is really good at. And given its age, it's easy to find cheap or free ebooks. Check the blurb for the concept if you might need content notes, but I can't quite work out how to summarise effectively without spoilers.

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.

kore

This was my first book for the 2019

50books_poc challenge. I loved it. My review is here. Very highly recommended.

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.

brainwane

I read The Underground Railroad in 2016. I thought it was engaging, moving, and accessible,* and I nominated it for a Hugo Award (Best Novel).

Na'amen Gobert Tilahun reviewed Underground Airlines as well as The Underground Railroad in Strange Horizons and discussed several aspects of both books. That review mentions speculative elements in Whitehead's book beyond the railroad mentioned in the title, in case you are wary of spoilers.

I have read John Henry Days, The Intuitionist, and I think at least one other Whitehead book, and am trying to reflect on how Whitehead approaches and uses the railroad, because I think it's different than the way a lot of speculative fiction authors do, and has more in common with how other mimetic fiction authors tend to use speculative premises. I want to compare The Underground Railroad to Never Let Me Go, where the story doesn't concentrate on (or, sometimes, even mention) the origin story of the big plot premise, and instead the story is entirely about the lives of people living or resisting -- just for themselves, to survive or thrive -- within that system.

* I think Whitehead deliberately works to make the book accessible to people who have not previously read slave narratives, fictional or nonfiction -- I think he spells out subtext more often than he would if he assumed the reader had more of a grounding in antebellum history or the history of anti-black racism in the US.

ms-mmelissa.livejournal.com

Maya Angelou is best known for her first autobiography, the groundbreaking I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which chronicles her early childhood before breaking off abruptly when she's seventeen. Gather Together in My Name picks up a short while after her last book broke off and chronicles Maya's early forays into adulthood.

I enjoyed Gather Together in My Name a great deal more than its predecessor. The work has received criticism for its looser structure; Marguerite stumbles in and out of jobs with regularity and falls in and out of love with men at the drop of the hat. This doesn't provide for a great, over-arching narrative, but then life seldom does, and this chaotic period of Maya Angelou's life (from about 17 to 19) seems to demand a less formal structure.

Angelou was purportedly hesitant to write about this period in her life and after reading the book it's easy to see why. Already a young mother at this point in her life, Angelou also spent this time period making forays into prostitution, both as prostitute and pimp, while remaining stunningly naive about the world around her and her own actions. Some of the most powerful moments of the book can be found in these passages; Angelou is at her best when she is speaking from the voice of teenage Marguerite, outlining her own beliefs and showing the reader how a headstrong girl who believed she was jaded and world-weary was repeatedly fooled by her own naiveté. However, Angelou was writing this at a point in her life where she was no longer a naive spirited girl, but a savvy woman and the voice of that woman occasionally emerges, to the book's detriment. In an early scene Marguerite goes to the home of a lesbian couple simply to show how laissez-faire and grown up she is. As the two begin to kiss in front of her Marguerite is overcome with revulsion and disgust, which Angelou promptly excuses as the bias and hatred of an ignorant girl repeating the prejudices of the world around her. The authorial intrusion is a rare mis-step in a work that is fearless in its refusal to apologize for its narrator.

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Title: The History of White People
Author: Nell Irvin Painter
Number of Pages: 496 pages
My Rating: 4.5/5

Amazon Summary: Who are white people and where did they come from? Elementary questions with elusive, contradictory, and complicated answers set historian Painter's inquiry into motion. From notions of whiteness in Greek literature to the changing nature of white identity in direct response to Malcolm X and his black power successors, Painter's wide-ranging response is a who's who of racial thinkers and a synoptic guide to their work. Her commodious history of an idea accommodates Caesar; Saint Patrick, history's most famous British slave of the early medieval period; Madame de Staël; and Emerson, the philosopher king of American white race theory. Painter reviews the diverse cast in their intellectual milieus, linking them to one another across time and language barriers. Conceptions of beauty (ideals of white beauty firmly embedded in the science of race), social science research, and persistent North/South stereotypes prove relevant to defining whiteness. What we can see, the author observes, depends heavily on what our culture has trained us to look for. For the variable, changing, and often capricious definition of whiteness, Painter offers a kaleidoscopic lens.

Review: This was an interesting book, but I often felt like I was slogging through a textbook trying to read it (especially the early chapters), so I kept setting it down and it actually took me several months to finally finish. I just didn't find the writing style engaging at all, otherwise I would probably have given if five stars.

But it was interesting, and I learned a lot of things about famous people of the past (none of them good) that I didn't know before. It was also interesting to see how little anti-immigrant rhetoric has changed. A lot of things people were saying about Irish, Italian, Eastern European, Jewish, etc. immigrants is pretty much word for word what people say about Latin@ immigrants today. A lot of "oh noes, the right people aren't having enough babies and the wrong people are having too many!" and that sort of thing. Except it wasn't Those Brown People who were going to destroy the White Race, is was Those Other Inferior White People.

Also, while this book is called The History of White People, it's very US-centric. She traces things from Europe to the US, but once she gets to the US, she really never talks about whiteness elsewhere for the rest of the book.

mizchalmers.livejournal.com

46. Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer

Big Ma said Cecile lived on the street. The park bench was her bed. She lived in a hole in the wall.

You can't say stuff like that to a kid asking about her mother when it's snowing outside or pouring down raining. You can't say, "Your mother lives on the street, in a hole in the wall, sleeping on park benches next to winos."

It is 1968. Three black girls fly from New York to Oakland to get acquainted with their mother, Cecile Johnson. Told in 11-year-old Delphine's wry voice, which never strains credulity, this deft book paints a vivid picture of Oakland and San Francisco at a moment of upheaval whose reverberations are still being felt around here, and elsewhere.

One Crazy Summer is the rare and brilliant Young Adult novel in which - without violating the constraints of the genre - every character is given his or her due. Everyone came from somewhere, everyone needs and wants something; everyone is capable of surprising depths and shallows. People change in plausible ways. Even the poetry woven into the story is convincing, and good; when does that EVER happen?

Slight as it is (I snorfled it down in a few hours) this book is as weighty as its themes, without ever losing its sense of humor. Very, very highly recommended.

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

14. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

A sort-of fantasy novel about Tilo, a 'Mistress of Spices'- immortal, mystical women, trained in magic and secret knowledge, sent out into the world to help people. Tilo is sent to Oakland, California, where she slowly becomes personally involved in the lives of the people around her, and begins to reveal her own backstory.

This novel is very hard to describe, because it doesn't have much of a plot for most of its length. Instead, it's full of beautiful, poetic descriptions of spices and food, magic, Oakland and imaginary places like the Island where Mistresses are trained. Some parts are very realistic; others involve rampaging pirate queens or singing sea serpents. It took me a while to get into this book, because the beginning is very slow, but by the end I was in love. The language is incredibly evocative, and the resolution felt just right. I really grew to like the characters, particularly Tilo, who shows herself to be much more of a flawed human than any mystical fairy.

Highly recommended.

Current Mood: lazy
Current Music: "Naomi" Neutral Milk Hotel

chomiji

It's highly unlikely that Maxine Kiss would ever fall for a sparkly vampire.

Maxine is the latest scion of a millennia-old family of demon hunters who are always female. She is also a living embodiment of the trope "Good Is Not Nice." Aided by a quintet of specialized demons who have assisted the Hunters throughout their history, Maxine ruthlessly annihilates evil wherever she finds it, and then she and her Boys go looking for more. Their usual prey are zombies, which in this scenario are humans possessed by relatively weak demons, but greater demons are in just as much danger whenever Maxine detects them.

This is not to say that Maxine is cold-hearted. In fact, she is fiercely loving. But her vulnerabilities are those of many badass male characters: her friends, her loved ones, her sense of honor. It makes me ferociously happy that her femininity is not used as a weakness.

During the course of these three volumes, Maxine discovers that she might, in fact, be not only the latest of the Hunters, but the last. She uncovers secrets about her family and her ancestry, learns about some of the other major players in the fate of the world (and finds that some of them are much closer to her than she would ever have guessed), and kicks a lot of ass. This is an Earth in which demonic chaos is constantly lurking behind the scenes, but most people are going about their ordinary lives with no knowledge of it. There are lots of pop culture references and in-jokes, and sometimes I think that Liu is working some of her shticks a little too hard, but generally the storyline races along with vivid language and terrific momentum.

I've seen these billed as paranormal romance, but although there is a small amount of romance during the course of the series, these are probably better classified as urban fantasy. There's considerable violence, too.

Current Mood: pleased

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

8. Anne Cherian, A Good Indian Wife

Leila is a teacher in a small South Indian town, who's beginning to worry that she might be too old to find a husband. Suneel is a doctor in San Francisco with a white girlfriend and no interest in returning to India. However, when Suneel goes to visit his sick grandfather, family machinations arrange a marriage between the two almost before they know what's happened. Now Leila has to adjust to her new husband and life in America, while Suneel strives to change as little as possible (including continuing the relationship with the girlfriend) and plots ways out of the marriage.

This book is a bit of a fairy tale, but despite that, it was a fun, quick read. I never felt very sympathetic to Suneel (HE'S TOTALLY A JERK, COME ON, HE DIDN'T BREAK UP WITH HIS GIRLFRIEND), but Leila is a great, interesting character, and I really enjoyed spending time with her. The writing is very good, and I was okay with the predictable plot for the sake of the vivid descriptions of food, clothing, sight-seeing, and Leila's gradual adjustments.

Not a deep book, but an enjoyable one. Recommended.

Current Mood: cheerful

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

7. Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy

This very short novel (though apparently heavily based on Kincaid's real life) follows Lucy, a young woman who moves from the Caribbean to New York City to become a nanny for a wealthy white family. There's little plot, and instead the book reads like a series of vignettes about Lucy's life, interspersed with memories of her childhood. The mother Lucy works for treats her more like a friend than an employee, leading to difficulties; Lucy adjusts to life in a new country; Lucy makes friends and has relationships. Despite relatively little happening, this is a powerful book. I found Lucy to be an insightful, cynical character, and really enjoyed her voice.

I actually read this book back in January and just have been terribly lazy about getting around to posting this review, but one scene in particular has stuck with me all this time: in New York, one day Lucy sees daffodils for the first time. However, as a child, Lucy memorized a poem about daffodils to recite at a school assembly, despite never having seen the flowers and their not growing in her country. This metaphor for the insidious results of colonialism and the ways it affects people really hit home.

Current Mood: cheerful

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

6. Paula Yoo, Good Enough

Patti is a Korean-American high school student who plays classical violin but has a secret obsession with boy band Jet Pack. Her parents expect her to study hard, go to her church youth group, and not date, but she's interested in new student Ben Wheeler, who teaches her about groups like the Clash and encourages her to apply to Julliard instead of HarvardYalePrinceton. I really enjoyed both Patti's problems and their resolution; it felt very true to me. Just as a personal note, I always love it when I find a well-written intelligent character, and Patti very much is. Many books will tell the reader that a character is smart, but it's rare for me to find one that can actually show it.

This isn't a deep book, but it's fun and engaging. It had some very funny parts, particularly the silly chapter titles (like "How to Make Your Korean Parents Happy") and spam recipes (which, uh, actually sounded really tasty, and I hate spam). A great read for when you want something light but enjoyable.

Current Mood: cheerful

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

4. Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People who Read Them

Elif Batuman, a Turkish-American woman who wants to grow up to become a writer, instead somehow finds herself getting a PhD in Russian literature. This collection of essays is about her graduate school experience (including endless questions on why she studies Russian literature instead of Turkish). Each of the essays focus on a particular moment in her studies: the trauma of attempting to help step up and run a conference, attending the quite strange International Tolstoy Conference in Russia despite the airline having lost her luggage, writing a paper on an ice palace in St. Petersburg, her relationship with another student. It's a very funny book, although unfortunately the essays don't hang together very well, and there's no sort of overall narrative. My favorite parts were the strange people she had to deal with, many of whom will probably sound familiar to anyone who has had to deal with academics.

In my opinion, the best essays were those dealing with the summer Batuman lived in Uzbekistan, in order to learn the language. You see, at her school PhD students are required to teach Russian 101 to undergraduates. However, as one of the few students who is not a native Russian speaker, Batuman is afraid to take on teaching this class, convinced that she'll make too many mistakes. So when she hears about an opportunity to teach Uzbek instead, she goes for it. Of course, she doesn't speak Uzbek, but neither does anyone else at the school, so they won't know if she messes up. And so she heads off to Uzbekistan for the summer. As you could probably guess, it does not work out as she expected.

A very funny book, although fairly forgettable. A fun read.

Current Mood: cheerful

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3. Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Wench

Whew, this is a depressing book. But well worth reading; the characters are all very believable and engaging, and the situation is compelling. It's a novel, but one based on a real-life situation: Tawawa House, a popular summer resort in the early and middle 1800s, located in Ohio but frequented by rich men from southern states. The story focuses on four black women, all slaves, and all brought by their owners to Tawawa House over repeated summers. Because, see, Tawawa House has a particular reason for being popular: it's a place where slave-owners can bring their black mistresses, leaving their wives behind.

This is a hard book to describe, because there's not much of a plot; most of what changes over the course of the novel is the slow shifts in Lizzy's (the main character) attitude toward her life and the other people in it. Wench is excellent at describing the tangled situation she and the other women find themselves in, their feelings about each other, other people back home on their plantations, and finding themselves in Ohio- a free state- while still being a slave. Each of the four women has differing attitudes towards their men, ranging from Lizzy (the main character), who really believes her owner loves her and her children, to Mawu, who would kill her owner given the chance. Lizzy's efforts to make a better life for her children shape her character and result in some of the most heart-breaking scenes in the book, while her time in Ohio tempts her to leave them behind and make an escape attempt.

Not a fun book, but an excellent one. I recommend it.

Current Mood: calm
Current Music: "A Europewide Search for Love" ballboy