Homeland Elegies - Ayad Akhtar

 I picked this book up at Goodwill while shopping for kitchen gadgets.  I was intrigued by the title and the author's background, a Pulitzer Prize drama winner.  It's the story of a young man of Pakistani descent whose parents immigrated to the U.S. in the 1970's.  He grows up in two worlds - that of his Muslim heritage and of his American birth.  He shares his treatment when trying to find a friend in downtown New York on 9/11, a sad beginning of the divisiveness today.  Through his eyes he shows us how someone perceived as an enemy struggles with daily life between two worlds.  He shares the every day life of a Muslim family, their customs and beliefs demonstrated in his interactions with his family.  The story opened my eyes to a different perspective.  I felt I was watching a play that showed me a different view of the country I call home.

Published:  2020  Read: September 2024  Genre: Memoir

Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books - Kirsten Miller

This is far and away my favorite book I've read this year!  A busybody in a small town achieves her long desired public recognition by leading a book banning drive and putting "good" books in a free-standing library in front of her house. Unbeknownst to her, the books are swapped out under their covers with the very books she banned and the community reads through the collection.  The author traces the impact of their reading, using banned book titles for her chapter headings.  She cleverly exposes our biases, prejudices, presumptions and blind spots on all sorts of topics on both sides of the spectrum. The story reinforced for me how books can affect our thinking and make us question our viewpoints and beliefs. She subtly reminds us that thinking you know someone can't be based on knowing what they read, even when that person is ourselves.  Her cast of characters are real people living real lives in a complex world. The epilogue includes a list of the banned books referenced in the story.  Highly recommended.

  Quote:

"Melody felt like the butt of a very bad joke.  The victim of a dark conspiracy.  An innocent bystander caught up in a terrible crime.  And for the very first time,she understood what her mother had been trying to tell her.  Giving a marriage everything you've got means one day you could be left with nothing."

Published: 2024  Read: August 2024  Genre: Fiction

A Fever in the Heartland - Timothy Egan

 

In the 1920s, after WWI and when the Jazz Age, flappers, and prohibition lived, the Ku Klux Klan emerged again, after having been eliminated after the Civil War.  This story tells how they came to have over 500,000 members in the mid-1920s, marching in mass in Washington DC.  The horrifying fact was that a major stronghold was Indiana, the "heartland" of the U.S.  The membership spread from there at the instigation of D.C. Stephenson, a despicable manipulator who coerced men to join for $10 a piece. He exploited the prejudices of whites against Jews, immigrants, and African-Americans. The book chronicles the rise of the Klan and its downfall (or maybe only its receding) after Stephenson is tried for a brutal attack on a young woman. It's easy to see the parallels to current U.S. divisive factions.  A must read.

Published: 2023  Read: October 2023 Genre: History 

me and white supremacy - Layla F Saad

 I read this book for a reading club seeking to understand our biases and beliefs around race.  It's written as a series of thoughtful, progressive essays followed by questions to be answered in writing where you reflect on the reading and your experiences with the topic.  The author's state that "the primary force that drives my work is a passionate desire to become a good ancestor" - by which she means to "seed new possibilities for those who will come after I am gone."

The author shares the definition of white supremacy as "a racist ideology that is based upon the belief that white people are superior in many ways to people of other races and that therefore, white people should be dominant over other races".  It explores not only the belief but its impact on organizations, societies and institutions in a culture.  The book looks at how this is manifested and experienced at a personal and individual level.

I admit this was a difficult book to work through and I'm glad I had the support of a study group.

Quotes:

"...when we don't agree with the answers we have demanded, we all too often feel qualified to dismiss them."

p. 212 - the Circle Way by Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea

p. 178 - White feminism is an extension of white supremacy.  It is only concerned with white women gaining parity with white men.

Published: 2020  Read: April 2022  Genre: Sociology, Non-Fiction

This is How It Always Is - Laurie Frankel

 This was a hard book to read.  It's the story of Claude/Poppy and his/her family.  The youngest of 5 boys, Claude sees himself as a girl.  His loving, caring parents are determined to accept him as he/she chooses and he navigates kindergarten with his gender diaspora supported by the school administration and unremarked by his classmates.  That is, until he's separated from his best friend who has a homophobic father with a gun.  His mother, a doctor, and his father, a writer, move the family to a "friendly" state and he starts school as Poppy.  At 10, a few years older, she's "outed" after years of her family keeping the secret.  Like any pre-teen, she has to navigate her reality in a world not necessarily accepting of who she is.

While my heart ached for her and her parents, it was a moving, honest, and enlightening story of the life a transgender child.  The author has a transgender child herself but the book is a fictionalized version of the many obstacles faced and solutions her and her family have created.  Highly recommended.

Quotes:

"...children being the enemies of plans and also the enemies of anything new besides themselves."

"They say it is what you never imagine can be lost that is the hardest to live without."

"He realized this was what his father hand been up to all these years, not entertaining his children [with his stories] but perfecting his world.  If you wrote your own characters, they didn't disappoint you like real people did.  If you told your own story, you got to pick your ending.  Just being yourself never worked, but if you made yourself up, you to go be exactly who you knew yourself. to be."

"All life.  You are never finish, never done.  Never become, always becoming.  You know?  Life is change so is always okay you are not there yet".

"...this was what stilled for her, smooth and clear as glass.  Dispelling fear.  Taming what was scary not by hiding it, not by blocking it or burying it, not by keeping it secret, but by reminding themselves and everyone else, to chose love, choose openness, to think and be calm.  That there were more ways than just two, wider possibilities than hidden or betrayed, stalled or brokenhearted, male or female, right or wrong.  Middle ways.  Ways beyond."

Published: 2017   Read: March 2022  Genre: Fiction

White Fragility - Robin Diangelo

Sub-title: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism

In the current political and social environment, this book was recommended to me by a relative who had read it for a diversity program.  This was a difficult read as it provided a viewpoint I don't think I'd been exposed to in the past and challenged my thinking on the topic of race.  

The author explains the evolution of white privilege in our society and its consequences and why it is so difficult to see ourselves as racist as a result of being born and raised in it.  I have a long way to go.

Quotes:

"The idea of racial inferiority was created to justify unequal treatment; belief in racial inferiority is not what triggered unequal treatment...first, we exploited people for their resources, not according to how they looked."

"Narratives of racial exceptionality [example of Jackie Robinson first African American in major league baseball] obscure the reality on ongoing institutional white control while reinforcing the ideologies of individualism and meritocracy." 

[Color blind - insists they don't see race, Color celebrate - sees and embraces diversity] "All the statements [made by these groups of people] ultimately function in a similar way; they all exempt the person from any responsibility for or participation in the problem." 

[Difference between race prejudice /discrimination and racism] While everyone of every race holds prejudice and can discriminate against someone of another race, in the US and other white/settler nations, only white people are in the position to oppress people of color collectively and throughout the whole of society."

"Conceptualizing myself on an active continuum changes the question from whether I am or am not racist to a much more constructive question: Am I actively seeking to interrupt racism in this context?  And perhaps even more importantly, how do I know?" 

"White fragility is also evidenced in the need for so many white progressives to 'build trust' before they can explore racism..[they are saying].I need to trust that you won't think I am racist before I can work on my racism." 

"To let go of the messenger and focus on the message is an advanced skill...Part of processing of that feedback [on our racist behavior and thoughts] will be to separate it from its delivery and ascertain the central point and its contribution to my growth." 

Published:  2018  Read: April 2021  Genre: Sociology, Politics 

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand - Helen Simonson

I put off reading this because when my book club discussed it I didn't think I'd be interested in it.  I was pleasantly surprised and enjoyed the story, however implausible.

Quotes:

"It's a fact of life, I suppose, that the younger generation must try to take over and run the lives of their elders.  I think my son tries to organize my life because it's easier than his own---give him a sense of being in control of something in a world that is not quite ready to put him in charge."

 "...the Major marveled anew at the way so many people were willing to spend time and energy on the adverse judgment of others."

 "At our age, surely there are better things to sustain us, to sustain a marriage than the brief flame of passion?"  'Your are mistaken Ernest', she said at last.  'There is only the passionate spark.  Without it, two people living together may be lonelier than if they lived quite alone'."

 "But we, who can do anything, we refuse to live our dreams on the basis that they are not practical."

"Sometimes I think God created the darkness just so he didn't have to look at us all the time."

Published:2010  Read: September 2016  Genre: Fiction

A Tidewater Morning - William Styron

I've been in a reading slump lately.  Nothing seems very compelling or read-worthy.  This short book of three stories about the author's youth were well written but didn't leave an impression.  I've been researching for our trip this summer, reading travel guides and maps and planning RV needs.  If anyone has some "you've got to read this" titles to recommend, let me know.

Published:  1993  Read: February 2016  Genre: Fiction (short story)