"In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.", Angela Davis

I recently listened to a podcast series called Seeing White, which explored how and why whiteness as a concept was a created, and how it continues to function in American society. (I know, I know, if you're someone who is also friends with me on social media you've heard me recommend this podcast multiple times. I don't care; you should listen to it.) One of the things I realized listening to the podcast was that even though I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about racial justice issues, I still have so much to learn about the history of race and the myriad ways white supremacy has been baked into the foundation of American society.

Bryan Stevenson's memoir, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, provides more insight into many of the issues raised in the podcast. Bryan Stevenson is a civil rights lawyer who has spent his career representing people whose rights have been trampled on by a racist criminal justice system. Founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson has argued cases before the US Supreme Court challenging the death penalty, and life imprisonment without parole for juvenile offenders. Just Mercy chronicles his early career; the cases he worked on and the legal issues they represented. Since his days as a young, overworked lawyer, Stevenson has become a sought-after expert on criminal justice reform. He has also, as head of the Equal Justice Initiative, given the country the first museum and memorial dedicated specifically to lynching victims.

Just Mercy does a beautiful job balancing legal theory with the very intense, very personal stories of the clients Stevenson and EJI represented over the years. Stevenson lays out a clear path from the racist policies of the Jim Crow era to the continued racist practices in the age of mass incarceration. He clearly demonstrates the inherent inequities in the jury selection process and the harsh realities of prison on juveniles who are tried as adults. Stevenson intersperses the stories of his clients with his own story, demonstrating a depth of compassion that adds emotional heft to an already powerful story. I don't know how anyone who reads this book could argue with the basic lack of justice in our so-called justice system. Just Mercy is a clarion call for reform, real reform, to a system that was designed to function as a form of social control over people of color and poor people, those who are the most vulnerable in our society.

My Lobotomy, Howard Dully (Charles Fleming)

Humans really don't have a great track record as a species when it comes to the way we treat people In fact, we don't even have a great track record of deciding what is and is not a mental illness in the first place. At various times in the last 200 years, we've pathologized a slave's desire to run away from slavery (drapetomania), women who are emotional and like sex (hysteria), and man-on-man or girl-on-girl action (homosexuality). Clearly, it's taken us a really long time to get around to understanding the full complexities of the human condition, and the medicalization of the normal range of human emotions continues today. There are some who are even questioning the psychiatrist's most important book, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which lists mental disorders, their symptoms, and possible treatments.
with mental illness.

One of the more recent (and shameful) periods in the history of mental health treatment came in the middle of the 20th century, the era of the lobotomy. A lobotomy is a surgical procedure that creates an incision in the brain, resulting in changes in personality, cognition, and behavior. The theory was that people with certain types of mental illness, especially those that resulted in abnormal, uncontrollable, or violent behavior, could be "cured" by disconnecting the pathways in the brain that are pathologically damaged. The procedure was pioneered by Portuguese neurologist Antonio Egas Moniz, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for advancement in psychosurgery. Perhaps the best-known lobotomy patient in the United States was Rosemary Kennedy, oldest sister to President John F. Kennedy. Born with cognitive disabilities, Rosemary's father Joseph ordered the procedure done on her when she was 23. However, serious complications during surgery resulted in her being severely disabled for the rest of her life, which she spent in an institution in Wisconsin. The lobotomy was also a prominent plot point in the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

In the US, Dr. Walter Freeman was the most vocal and enthusiastic proponent of the procedure, and he developed his own version of the surgery, involving a literal icepick to the brain, inserted through the eye-socket. Freeman performed thousands of these procedures, despite having no surgical training. Up to 40% of his patients were being treated for homosexuality, which resulted in almost 2000 otherwise healthy people being brain damaged for life. He was finally banned from performing the procedure, but not before he had affected thousands of lives, including the lives of at least 19 minors.

One of those children was 12 -year-old Howard Dully.  In 1960, Dully's father and step-mother, after a year or more of taking Howard from psychiatrist to psychiatrist, stumbled upon Dr. Freeman. Dully's step-mother, Lou, was physically and emotionally abusive to Howard, constantly berating him and using him as the scapegoat for her biological son's behavior. She had taken Howard to many psychiatrists, none of whom found anything wrong with the boy that couldn't be explained by a stressful and toxic home environment. Dully's father, Rodney, was unwilling or unable to stand up to his wife, and, in fact, was also physically violent with Howard. Lou finding Dr. Freeman was the worst kind of luck for Howard. Lou was determined to have Howard removed from her home, and Dr. Freeman was overly-enthusiastic about performing lobotomies. Despite his own admission that he believed Lou to be the problem in the household, he agreed to perform the procedure on Howard. Instead of fixing the "problem", the surgery resulted in permanent changes to Howard's memory, cognition, and personality, and exacerbated his difficult home life. Forty years later, happy for the first time in his life, Dully decides to try to determine exactly what happened to him in the months and years leading up to and just after the procedure.

The telling is straight-forward and no-nonsense. Dully shares stories of his abuse and neglect, as well as honest accounts of the poor choices he made as he moved into adulthood. He did not have an easy life-he experienced abuse, drug addiction, homelessness, and incarceration. While no direct cause and effect can be drawn between the lobotomy itself and his future outcomes, it certainly couldn't have helped.  It was part of a pattern of trauma, physical and emotional, that has certainly been shown over time to correlate to exactly the kind of actions that lead to drug addiction, homelessness, and incarceration later in life. What is clear, however, is that Dr. Freeman was guilty of more than just malpractice. His ethical and moral violations are mind-boggling by today's standards, and even during his most active period, there were those in his field who refused to associate themselves with him. But somehow he convinced enough people that his procedure was "curing" things like schizophrenia and homosexuality that he was allowed to continue practicing for YEARS. Historically, "cures" for mental illness have caused more problems than they've solved, and have led to real torture for some patients.

While we've certainly made advancements from the earliest days of locked asylums, ice baths, and electroshock treatments, we've still got a mental health crisis in the United States. The majority of people incarcerated are diagnosed with or show signs of mental illness. Ditto many people experiencing homelessness. In Cook County, Illinois, the largest provider of mental health services is the Cook County Jail. Lack of funding, lack of community support, lack of adequate mental health first aid training, overpoliced communities, and the effects of trauma on the brain all contribute to a system that abandons the most vulnerable patients to a patchwork of unreliable services, the jail, or the streets. Because I don't see any alternative to hope, I have to believe that eventually, we as a society will recognize the value of prioritizing the elimination of poverty and violence, as well as compassionate care for those who are suffering from mental illness or trauma.

The Burn Journals, Brent Runyon

This year, my district has experienced three student suicides; two middle schoolers and a high schooler. As the number of teens experiencing mental health issues continues to rise, we in the school community are left to support our students the best way we can, while dealing with our own trauma, often without adequate numbers of counselors or social workers to help us all cope. This increase in rates of teen depression and anxiety has me searching for answers, answers to the questions that plague me on some of my sleepless nights; how can I make a positive difference in the life of my youth group members and my students so they never feel the utter despair that leads to suicide?

One way I try to find the answer is to read. Of course, that's my go-to for most things; no matter the question or need I always think, "There's a book for that". But I hope that by finding compelling stories of teenagers who attempted suicide but ultimately overcame their despair, I can point students towards the authors who will make them know they are not alone and that recovery is possible. One such book is The Burn Journals by Brent Runyon. When Brent was 14, he poured gasoline all over himself and lit himself on fire. The formerly excellent student had started to slip into some poor life choices, including setting a locker on fire. Sure he was going to be caught, he decided the only thing left to do was to die. With third degree burns over 85% of his body, he spent the next year in the hospital recovering from his injuries. While there, he was forced to confront the feelings that caused him to attempt suicide in the first place, and to try to fathom why he chose THAT method. The book details his long journey to wellness, both physical and mental.

Like many teen suicide attempts, this one is impulsive. Faced with disappointing his parents, Brent can only see one way out. Throughout his recovery, he goes back again and again to that one instant. Between the support of his brother, the love of his parents, and the amazing nurses who care for him, he begins to realize how much he has to live for. He decided to start writing The Burn Journals on the 10th anniversary of his suicide attempt. Over the year he had not shared much of his story with others, choosing instead to focus on his future, but with the anniversary he felt as though it was time to share his story, in the hopes of helping others see that there is always another way. Runyon's writing is straightforward, and he doesn't try to soften or minimize anything. I think that this book would be good to use in a classroom when discussing mental health, decision making, or perseverance. It could also be part of a unit on memoirs; the structure of the story and the amount of detail make it a good example of the genre.

Mom & Me & Mom, Maya Angelou

Not gonna lie-I specifically went to Audible looking for an audiobook narrated by Maya Angelou. I recently finished listening to Toni Morrison read her novel God Help the Child, and it was such a treat to hear the story told in the author's own voice, I knew I had to see if Maya Angelou had narrated any of her books prior to her passing. I could listen to her read the phone book.

Luckily, I discovered that not only had she narrated at least one of her books, it was one I hadn't yet read! Win-win! The book I found was Mom & Me & Mom, Angelou's memoir of her relationship with her mother, Vivian Baxter.

Angelou famously wrote about her early life in the memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. We learn that her mother sent her and her brother from California to Stamps, Arkansas to live with their grandmother Henderson when Maya was only three. Maya and her brother Bailey spent the next ten years living in Arkansas. When Maya was 13, her mother called for her and Bailey to come back to California, and it is that this point that Mom & Me & Mom picks up the tale. Maya and Bailey traveled to San Fransisco and moved into their mother's large Victorian house. They realized very quickly that their life in California would be much different than sleepy Stamps, Arkansas.

As a long-time fan of Maya Angelou, I knew that she was an exceptional woman. But after listening to this book, I know that there can never be another woman like her. Because learning more about her life, I can't believe that anyone will ever have the unique experiences again that formed Angelou into the wise, insightful, brave woman she was. In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, we learn about many of the transformative events in Maya's life, but Mom & Me & Mom provides a broader context for understanding those events, and details some stories we've not heard before. Vivian Baxter,  was a palpable presence in all of the decisions Maya made in her teenage and young adult years, not least because she was such a presence, period. She was a strong women, sharply intelligent, who suffered no fools. She was a woman of stormy passions, who could love you up one minute and slap the mess out your mouth the next. She was a realist, a pragmatist, someone who recognized that a woman needed her own power to prevent her from becoming beholden to some man for protection. She dressed impeccably, had marvelous manners, and expected everyone else to rise to her high standards. While Maya and Vivian had a complex relationship, at its core was the deep abiding love of a mother for a child, and a child for its mother.

Hole in My Life, Jack Gantos

You know, as someone who works with teenagers on a regular basis, I am sometimes astounded by the fact that any of us actually make it to adulthood in one piece. I can think of at least a dozen times between the ages of 13 and 21 when I made some decision that should probably have resulted in my fiery death or dismemberment, but somehow I managed to survive my own stupidity.

Essentially, Hole in My Life by Jack Gantos is one long example illustrating my point. In it, Gantos tells the story of his late teen years, when he was drifting between his family's home in the Virgin Islands and rented efficiency apartments back in the States. Gantos' father had moved the family to the Virgin Islands to start his own contracting business, which he expected Jack to work for when he graduated from high school. Jack did give it a go, joining his family in the islands after graduating from school in Florida, but when a government overthrow caused the tourists to dry up and construction to stop, Jack knew that if he ever wanted to have enough money for college, or to travel around the world finding story ideas for the books he hoped to one day write, he was going to have to get out of the islands and do something big. And because he was 19, and therefore prone to risk-taking and poor decision making, he agreed to help sail a boat full of drugs from the Virgin Islands to New York in exchange for enough money to get him started on his grand writing dreams.

As you can imagine, this did not turn out well for Jack. Gantos shares his story with self-deprecating humor and full recognition of just how stupid his choices were. But this is more than just a cautionary tale for young people about the perils of trying to take short-cuts in life. At its core, it is the story of how one writer found his voice, and went from thinking about writing to actually doing it. It wasn't until Jack was locked up in a small, yellow cell that he was finally forced to confront his own thoughts in a way that just HAD to be put on paper.

I enjoyed this book as an adult reader, but it is considered YA. I think that for many teens, the struggles Gantos goes through in the beginning of the book will resonate, and his tone is never preachy. The way he tells his story feels more like the way a new friend might tell you a crazy story from before you knew them than an object lesson on walking the straight and narrow.

Old Records Never Die, by Eric Spitznagel

In the interest of full disclosure, I need to start this review with the admission that the author is a friend of mine. And, I'm sort of in the book. Which means I probably shouldn't even be reviewing it at all. And if I worked at an actual magazine writing official journalisty book reviews they would never in a million years let me be the one to review this book. But I don't. This is MY blog, and I DO WHAT I WANT.

Of course, I read the book in April when it was published, and I have gone back and forth with myself ever since about whether I can actually give it a fair review, or at least, if anyone else will believe I can give it a fair review. Plus, it feels a bit like an exercise in self-aggrandizement. "Look at me world, I know someone who wrote a book that was named one of Amazon's "must read" books. I am literary fame adjacent!" But here's the thing-I didn't just love this book because my friend wrote it. I love it because it is funny and tender and nostalgic and insightful (and funny, did I mention it's funny?).

Old Records Never Die is the true tale of a hero's quest. Spitznagel, our middle-aged protagonist, is driving down Lakeshore Drive one day, thinking about an interview he recently did with Questlove. Questlove is famous for being a prodigious vinyl record collector. He still has the very first 45 he ever bought. Suddenly, the growly rasp of a young Jon Bon Jovi comes on the satellite radio station, and Eric is struck by a bolt of lightning in the form of a sudden compulsion. He wants his records back. The records he collected in the 80s and 90s that he sold to pay rent. Not just records with the same titles as back in the 80s and 90s, but the ACTUAL records he owned. Records he had listened to over and over in his childhood home, his teenage bedroom, his college dorm, his first apartment. Records that he listened to with his dad, fought over with his brother, bought as bait for a certain girl in high school, or smoked weed to. Thus begins the epic journey, fraught with danger(ous, moldy piles of old records), which would lead Eric through the land of record conventions and other middle-aged dudes' basements, where he would meet fellow vinyl obsessives, and a few strange and perhaps slightly unhinged characters.

Of course, along the way he also rediscovers some of the younger self he left behind when he sold those records in the first place. I suppose it's natural when one gets to a certain point in one's life to reflect on the person you were in your teens and early 20s. Sometimes I think about my younger self and have trouble imagining that person eventually became me. There are things that happened that I wish I had paid more attention to at the time, and things that I spent way more emotional time and energy on than I should have. At the same time, I realize that impossible as it may seem from my lofty middle-aged perch, the me of today is the sum total of all of the things that younger self said and thought and did. This is something that Spitznagel explores throughout the book.

But this is not just a sappy trip down Memory Lane. There is little in the way of rank sentimentality in Old Records Never Die. Because Eric doesn't just stop at reliving his glory days (which he admits, with self-deprecating humor, weren't necessarily all that glorious). He isn't the musical equivalent of that old jock who never left home regaling everyone with stories of the time he threw the winning touchdown in the big game against Nowheresville. Spitznagel also examines how objects we owned at certain times in our lives become totems, tangible reminders of who were were when we got them. I am not a vinyl collector myself (though I do own a copy of Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet, given to me by my brother a few Christmases ago), but what Eric feels for records, I feel for books. I still have my original copies of the Little House books, and the Narnia books, and the copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn that I read at least once a year for a decade or more. When I look at them, I see my 10 year old self reading in my bedroom surrounded by unicorn posters, or my 15 year old self trying desperately to get lost in the world of turn-of-the-century Brooklyn in a effort to forget that I was home alone on a Friday night. The Handmaid's Tale makes me remember myself as the college student who's world was turned upside down when she discovered feminism. Those books each hold a piece of who I would become, and I love them as unreasonably as Eric might love a warped old Replacements album.

There's also great stuff in Old Records Never Die about parenting and marriage and family and grief. Things that folks who aren't music collectors (or book collectors, or collectors of Doctor Who memorabilia, or whatever) can totally relate to, even if they don't really get why a 40-something man would spend a year of his life and a not inconsiderable amount of money tracking down pieces of black plastic. I especially recommend the last chapter, if you are looking for the feels. Because when you get right down to it, this book about music isn't just a book about music.

The Reason I Jump, Naoki Higashida

For the first 20 years of my teaching career, I taught self-contained special education.  I chose special education as a career for two reasons.  The first was the book A Circle of Children, by Mary McCracken.  It is a memoir of McCracken's time teaching in a school for children with severe social/emotional disabilities. The second reason was my experiences volunteering at a day camp for children with special needs in the south suburbs of Chicago as a teen.  Not only was I fascinated by the puzzle that these children presented to educators, I was deeply moved watching them grow from year to year, and I knew that I wanted to be a part of that process.

During those years, I met and worked with many, many children.  Quite a few were diagnosed with autism, both the more stereotypical "hand-flapping, spinning-objects" kind, and the varied forms that we have come to recognize today as part of a spectrum of symptoms.  Some of the children were non-verbal, some of them talked non-stop, though usually only about whatever obsession they were currently stuck in.  I learned all about the difference between asphalt and concrete from Keeler, and more about Uh Gi Oh than I would ever need to know from Nick.  Kameron mostly just repeated what other people said to him (called echolalia), but when he did verbalize his own thoughts they almost always had to do with basketball.  I knew children with autism who didn't like to be touched at all, and some who wanted nothing more than deep pressure all the time.  I knew children with autism who never demonstrated self-stimulation, and some who would bounce on their toes or flap their hands non-stop without intervention.  And no matter which child I was currently working with, I always, always wondered what they were thinking about.  Were they content to be left alone?  What made them suddenly take off running?  Why did they insist on wearing the same clothes, day in and day out, regardless of the weather?  Why could they echo whatever was said to them, but not tell us their own thoughts and dreams.

We know so much more about autism than we ever have before.  We know that the issues people with autism have with touch and sound and light has to do with differences in their sensory integration.  We know that people with autism can exhibit different behaviors based on where they fall on the spectrum, and that some disorders that we called something else previously are in fact related to autism spectrum disorder.  But there are also still lots of mysteries.  No one knows the cause of autism (but we know it is NOT childhood vaccines, in case you've heard that in the media).  No one is entirely sure why the repetitive and obsessive behaviors exhibited by many people with autism are so comforting to them, nor do we know why not every person with autism has these behaviors.  But we may now have a better idea about what people with autism may be thinking about, thanks for a remarkable 13 year old Japanese boy.  Naoki Higashida shares his thoughts and experiences as a person with autism, and takes some guesses about how things may be with others who have autism, in his bookThe Reasons I Jump.  He gives us insight into the internal life of people with autism in a way that I have never seen before.

 There are many noteworthy things about this book.  It has an interesting format, in that Higashida starts each section with a question that neurotypical may ask about autism (and probably have asked), and then proceeds to answer the questions according to his own experience.  The book is also interspersed with short stories that demonstrate some aspect  of Higishida's inner life.  But the thing that makes this book truly amazing is the fact that Higishida is non-verbal. He can speak, but the process is so difficult for him that he uses a communication grid he devised himself, or a computer, to write what he wants to say.  Without those adaptions, he would most certainly be trapped inside his own head, unable to communicate at all.  No one would ever have had access to his insight into living with autism, and that would be a tragedy.


Essentially, his message is one that I think probably resonates with anyone who has a physical or mental illness.  Have compassion, have patience, and have understanding, because people with autism or other disabilities don't have control over that disability.  He acknowledges over and over that he knows it can be taxing and frustrating to take care of people with autism.  He knows that having to say the same things over and over again, only to have the person with autism forget what they were told is difficult.  He knows that it worries his parents when he suddenly runs away from them, or when he doesn't notice the world around him and its many possible dangers.  But he tries, and he wants to be recognized as a person with needs, a person who does not always live up to his own expectations for himself, but who is honestly, truly trying to understand how to live in a neurotypical world.    He also reveals a deep sense of self-awareness and insight that I think many people working with people on the autism spectrum would find unbelievable.  Some people living with autism are so distant emotionally and cognitively from the world us neurotypicals live in that it is hard to believe that are thinking about much of anything at all.  How many times have I heard the words, "He's in his own world" used to describe someone with autism?  I've thought it myself often enough over the years.  And for some people with autism it may be true that their experience of the world are so different than mine that it really is like another world, but I suspect more often people with autism are looking for the same things all of us are-safety, comfort, and meaningful human connection.

Poor Little Rich Girl, Chinese Style

If you are a person who knows anything about Chinese culture, beginning in the medieval period through the 20th century, you probably know that women were not valued in society, except as pawns in their family's quest for wealth or political gain.  Foot binding and female infanticide are the two most horrific examples of this attitude I can think of, but overall the fate of women and girls in China has largely been left in the hands of their fathers and husbands.  Foot binding continued into the 20th century, and even today in China girl babies are abandoned to orphanages at a much high rate than male children.

And, as Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter demonstrates, this sad state of affairs for women and girls crossed class lines, and affected both the rich and poor alike.  But Falling Leaves is more than just a story of a Chinese girl who grows to thriving womanhood in spite of her family's cruelty. It is the story of China's transition from monarchy to communism, both from the perspective of how it affected the daily lives of its people, and how it changed the economic landscape for the wealthy and well-educated. The author, Adeline Yen Mah, is the titular unwanted daughter.  She was the result of her wealthy father's first marriage, but her mother died soon after giving birth to her.  In Chinese tradition, this was the first mark against her-she brought bad luck to her mother, so she was bound to bring bad luck to others.  When her father remarried, to a much younger Eurasian woman, she and her older brothers and sister were shunted from the forefront of family life to the background.  They were forced to watch as their younger half-brother and sister were given every advantage, while they had to beg for even the most basic necessities, such as train fare to get to school.  Her step-mother, Niang, was cruel and manipulative, setting the siblings against each other whenever possible, and eventually beating down her husband's spirit such that he no longer stood up for his older children.  Ma and her siblings were mostly able to escape their step-mother's day to day control, but she held the reins on the family finances and pitted her children against each other until her death.

Despite her lonely, abusive childhood, Ma was extraordinarily privileged compared to most of her countrymen.  Her family was able to escape to Hong Kong before the Cultural Revolution, and was able to keep most of it's wealth along the way, But that privilege did not keep her from being affected by the larger societal forces at work, and it certainly didn't help her beloved aunt, a mother figure for Ma, or her elderly grandfather, who was made to feel like a beggar in his own home.

Ma tells her story matter of factly, without drama or exaggeration.  In a way that makes her story all the more chilling, reflecting as it does the emotional barrenness that Ma lived with most of her childhood. Just relating the events as they happened was enough to make me feel her loneliness, her longing for acceptance, her anger, and, in the end, her resignation.  Ma's story should strike a chord with anyone who has desperately tried to gain acceptance and love from people who were never able to give it, as her step-mother appears not to be able to do.  May as well try to get love and acceptance from a piece of cold, green jade.

The Least Depressing Book about Death I've Ever Read

Occasionally my book club forces me to go outside of my regular reading comfort zone and try something that I would never have picked up on my own.  I remember thinking that I wasn't really interested in reading The End of Your Life Book Club, by Will Schwalbe.  It's non-fiction, for a start, though it is memoir, which I find much more enjoyable than other forms of that genre.  But I will admit to having some prejudices.  I imagined a book full of discussions about "how to deal with death/dying" books, and I was prepared for something akin to The Five People You Meet in Heaven (not that there's anything wrong with that-just not my cup of tea).

What I got instead was a smart, thoughtful, thought-provoking look at the end of a remarkable life.  Will Schwalbe's mother, Mary, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2007.  She was a strong, confident, socially conscious woman who had worked for years supporting refugees in war-torn parts of the world.  She had traveled to some of the most dangerous places in earth, and when she came back from a trip to Afghanistan feeling ill, at first no one thought too much of it.  But what her doctors thought was a form of hepatitis was soon revealed to be tumors in her pancreas, which had already spread to her liver.  And while treatment could extend her life, the illness was terminal.  This left Mary with the task of living while dying, and her family the task of figuring out how to relate to their spouse and mother knowing her time was limited.

Will would often accompany his mother to her chemo treatments, and it was in the waiting and treatment rooms at Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York that they started what was to become a two-person, mother-son book club.  Both Mary and Will had always been avid readers, and the books they chose to read were either old favorites or new stories they discovered with and for each other.  The chapter titles are the titles of the books they read together, and each book frames a different part of their experience.  Some of the books had new meaning reading them while in the process of dying.  Some of them reminded Mary or Will about the things that were important in life, and all of them were high-quality literature.  My fears of a book full of trite, sentimental soundbites and self-help advice were unfounded.  In fact, as I read I found myself drawn more into the books they were reading than the story of their relationship.  I got a new reading list out of it, in fact.

That's not to say that the story was moving and emotional on a personal level.  Will and his mother had the enormous privilege of having the means and opportunity to spend this time together.  At several points in the book, Will or Mary points out how lucky they are to be in a position for her to get the best possible care, or for Will to quit his job and take on a new venture without worrying about losing his house or feeding himself. But ultimately, all of the money and education and connections in the world could not stop the inevitable progression of her disease.  Rather than railing against his mother's fate, Will is grateful for the time they were able to have, memories that will now forever be associated with the many wonderful books they read and loved together.

I'm Perfect, You're Doomed: Growing Up JW

As a school teacher, I am intimately familiar with one aspect of Jehovah's Witness theology-the prohibition against celebrating holidays.  Every year there was at least one child in my class who would have to sit out during our Halloween, Christmas, and Valentine's parties.  Occasionally they would also have to leave the room while birthday treats were passed out, and of course, alternate assignments had to be given for any holiday themed project.  Other than their apparent aversion to party food and paper hearts, I knew very little about their actual beliefs.  To be honest, I wasn't even sure if Jehovah's Witness fell under the umbrella of Christianity.  I gleaned a bit more over the years, and as a Unitarian Universalist I felt strongly that I should respect the right of everyone to follow whatever religious path they wanted, as long as it wasn't hurtful to anyone else.

Well, I can't speak to how most Jehovah's Witnesses practice their faith, and whether they find it oppressive or painful, but I know of at least one who did.  In I'm Perfect, You're Doomed, Kyria Abrahams shares stories from her childhood in a religious JW family (an abbreviation that I use because she did).  They are alternately hilarious and horrifying-like the meetings her mother would have with her teachers at the beginning of the year to discuss the many benefits having a Witness in class will bring, or the fact that according to the elders the Smurfs were actually little blue demons that could steal your soul for Satan.

The book opens when Kyria is in elementary school, and she tells the quirky, sometimes crazy stories about her family and their Kingdom Hall with self-deprecating wit and an ability to laugh at herself.  As she gets older in the memoir, however, her stories take on a dark tone that made me realize just how difficult it was for her to live up to the pressure of living up to the almost impossible standards of the only "true" Christians.  As her life spirals out of control, the true dangers of any fundamentalist upbringing becomes clear-Kyria has no idea how to deal with anything that contradicts her very rigid belief system , and no idea how to function in the real world.  By the end of the book, I'd gone from laughing out loud to gasping in horror.  And I can honestly say that the more I learned about Jehovah's Witness the more I became convinced that no matter how much my Unitarian Universalist heart wants to respect other people's faith traditions,  the inherent problems with the judgmental, rigid theology of the Jehovah's Witness seems more problematic than redemptive.

Let's Pretend This Never Happened, AKA Stream of Consciousness I Actually Liked

Ok, I suppose that technically this book is not actually written in purposeful, literary stream of consciousness, but Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir is so full of the rambling thoughts of the author, Jenny Lawson, that it may as well be.  That sentence actually makes that sound like a bad thing, but in fact Lawson's book is a hilarious look at the inner workings of a very intense, interesting mind, and the outer ramifications of those thoughts entering the world through word or deed.

Let's Pretend This Never Happened details Lawson's rather, shall we say, unconventional upbringing in west Texas, her journey to adulthood, and her relationship with her husband over 15 years of their marriage. There's taxidermy, animal attacks (real and perceived), disastrous dinner parties, awkward conversations, vultures, homemade colon cleanses, and a five foot tall metal rooster.  Luckily there are photos to prove some of the more fantastic stories-since frankly no one would probably believe them otherwise.

If you are a fan of Jen Lancaster's books (Bitter is the New Black, My Fair Lazy, etc...), then you will probably love this book.  Lawson had that same brand of snarky, sarcastic humor, which is only not obnoxious because most of the time she turns it against herself.  Her relationship with her husband, Victor, reminded me so much of Jen Lancaster's husband Fletch that I am almost convinced that there is a secret group of men out there who are tasked with marrying women who will need to be talked down off the metaphorical ledge on a daily basis.  Unlike Lancaster, however, Lawson has the most bizarre life history of any real person I can think of.  And she the most hilarious parts of the book come from the fact that she is basically a social cripple-if her stories are to be believed, she is pretty much incapable of having a normal conversation with someone she's just met, or her husband's co-workers, or pretty much anyone in real life.  There are many examples in the book, and most of them seem to involved using the word vagina...a lot!  IN the end, Lawson concludes that it is not the triumphs in life that define us, but those moments we'd just like to pretend never happened.

Cross-Blog Pollination-I am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced

I posted this review first on my children's and young adult book blog, Second Childhood Reviews this morning, and while I don't usually review the children's and YA books I read here on this blog (after all, that's why I have two!), this book is worth sharing with a wider audience.  I imagine my own daughter at 10, and can only feel rage at a society that allows-hell, encourages-the sexual assault and physical abuse of young girls.


Summary:  (from publisher)
Forced by her father to marry a man three times her age, young Nujood Ali was sent away from her parents and beloved sisters and made to live with her husband and his family in an isolated village in rural Yemen. There she suffered daily from physical and emotional abuse by her mother-in-law and nightly at the rough hands of her spouse. Flouting his oath to wait to have sexual relations with Nujood until she was no longer a child, he took her virginity on their wedding night. She was only ten years old.

Unable to endure the pain and distress any longer, Nujood fled—not for home, but to the courthouse of the capital, paying for a taxi ride with a few precious coins of bread money. When a renowned Yemeni lawyer heard about the young victim, she took on Nujood’s case and fought the archaic system in a country where almost half the girls are married while still under the legal age. Since their unprecedented victory in April 2008, Nujood’s courageous defiance of both Yemeni customs and her own family has attracted a storm of international attention. Her story even incited change in Yemen and other Middle Eastern countries, where underage marriage laws are being increasingly enforced and other child brides have been granted divorces.


Review:
Nujood's story is simply but powerfully written.  Detailing a loss of innocence that was made all the more brutal for coming from the betrayal of her parents, I Am Nujood is both an easy and a difficult read.  While the sexual assaults that she endured daily are only described in much detail once, the effect of it on her is both tragic and ultimately redemptive.  Despite all teachings to the contrary, Nujood refuses to accept that her fate as a woman is to be beaten and raped by her "husband", showing a bravery that not many adult women in repressive societies do.  Her determination to move forward and help other girls is an example to any survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault, whether from countries where the practice is societally supported or from more "enlightened" countries like America, where supposedly we value women more.


But this book is much more than one personal story of survival and redemption.  This book can be used to highlight the very real problem of forced child marriage that exists in parts of the developing world.  Unicef estimates that in Africa, there the practice is prevalent, 42% of girls will be married before the age of 18, many without their consent.  This means that a lack of formal schooling and a separation from the rest of society will only lead to a perpetuation of the cycle for their daughters.  Child marriage is most often the result of poverty combined with a  rigid sense of honor.  This sense of having to "honor" the family by putting up with abuse is pervasive and makes girls in this situation feel ashamed of their desire not to be married.  There is much work to be done to help women world-wide gain the education and rights necessary for them to have true self-determination, not to have to choose between the equally unacceptable alternatives of staying with their family and starving or being forced into a marriage with an older man and enduring whatever abuse he chooses to throw her way.  


While the reading level for this book is quite low, the content is mature, and should it should be read with guidance by younger teens.  I believe that it could be a very powerful book to use in the classroom, however, not necessarily for its literary merit as much as for the issues it raises about human rights.  While the description of Nujood's rape on the first night of her marriage is disturbing, it is not graphic in nature in terms of language.  I believe that it would make an excellent addition to any high school literature or social sciences curriculum, and that it could be used as a jumping-off point for a unit on the status of girl children throughout the world.

Haven't I Heard This Somewhere Before?

In Running With Scissors, Augusten Burroughs gave us a hilarious and horrifying look into his early life.  When his parents divorced, Augusten's mother signed over guardianship of him to her psychotic psychiatrist.   Refusing to go to school, he spent his days drinking or getting high with this foster sister, and being preyed upon by a 33 year old pedophile.  It was a story like no other-hopefully because no one else has ever lived through that particular brand of hell.

Dry picks up the story of his life as an award winning copywriter at an ad agency and raging alcoholic. After a particularly disastrous business meeting, his company gives him an ultimatum-go to rehab or lose his job.  He enters rehab determined to treat it as a spa vacation, only to be confronted pretty quickly with the strange world of group therapy and the 12 steps.  He leaves rehab determined to stay sober, but the pressures of real life threaten his fragile sobriety.  And this, this is a story I've heard before.


Granted, Dry is told with Burrough's usual wit.  I admire his ability to laugh at himself, and unlike some recovery memoirs this one is not preachy or sentimental.  But it also doesn't really have anything new to say on the subject of addiction.  He was a drunk, for understandable reasons, but still a drunk.  He nearly ruined his own (and a few other people's) life.  He met some unusual characters in rehab, had difficulty re-entering the "real" (read: sober) world, etc...etc...If you are a fan of Augusten Burroughs, it is probably worth reading just so you can say you've read the "complete set", so to speak, but if you've never read his books before, start with Running with Scissors-much more compelling story.

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress

Imagine the most embarrassing thing your parents ever made you wear or do.  Now multiply that by 10 and you may have some idea of Rhoda Janzen's childhood.  In her memoir, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, Janzen tells the story of growing up in the Mennonite community in California, and going back to that community at 40 in the wake of a divorce and major health crisis.

Janzen's father was a leader in the Mennonite community, traveling the world and converting non-believers.  Her mother was the backbone of their family.  She was the one that made their lard sandwiches for their school lunches (yes, I said lard), and sewed mismatched strips of fabric at the bottom of their pants when they got too short (you begin to see where the embarrassment comes in).  Rhoda and her sister are very close, and both of them left the community for college.  Their three brothers married nice Mennonite girls and settled down to raise nice Mennonite children. 

Janzen describes her family and her life as an adult with humor, which is good, considering how challenging some of it was.  She was married for 16 years to a man with bi-polar disorder, and like many people in her situation she rationalized away much of his behavior, telling herself that he really loved her underneath all of the cruelty and obsessive behavior.  What she couldn't rationalize away was Bob, the man that her husband met on Gay.com.  Despite having become a non-believer herself, when she goes home to heal after her divorce and a major car accident, she finds herself comforted by how little has changed.

Janzen is an English professor, and you can tell.  Her vocabulary is impressive, though it can be disconcerting to read a story about some rather mundane aspect of life and have to look up a word to understand her point.  Despite my rather frequent trips to websters.com, it was an easy, enjoyable read.

Nice to Meet You, Literary Blog Hop- Charmed, I'm sure!

Welcome, lovers of literature, to my first adventure in Literary Blog Hopping.  I've been remiss in my blogging of late-I blame those pesky little things called working and going to school.  Darn that need to make money anyway!  But I digress...The Literary Book Blog is hosted by the The Blue Bookcase, and is defined as...

How do I know if my blog qualifies as "literary"? Literature has many definitions, but for our purposes your blog qualifies as "literary" if it focuses primarily on texts with aesthetic merit. In other words, texts that show quality not only in narrative but also in the effect of their language and structure. YA literature may fit into this category, but if your blog focuses primarily on non-literary YA, fantasy, romance, paranormal romance, or chick lit, you may prefer to join the blog hop at Crazy-for-books that is open to book blogs of all genres. 

If you're interested in my cogitations about whether I am "literary" enough for this hop, you can find them in my post Does It Matter What We Read?
 

This week's question is:
Is there such a thing as literary non-fiction? If so, how do you define it? Examples?

While I admittedly don't read a ton of non-fiction, I can say with certainty that the answer is yes, there can be literary non-fiction.  If you consider the many definitions of literature, they often contain a reference to the aesthetic or structural nature of the work.  Non-fiction writing can be transcendently beautiful, incredibly heartbreaking, lyrical and gritty-the best non-fiction doesn't just inform you about the chosen topic, but about life and love and pain and joy and sorrow.

There are a few examples I can think of for the subcategory of literary non-fiction.  Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, considered by many to be the first in the true crime genre, comes to mind.  The writing is spare, the mood evocative-sounds literary to me.  There's also Maya Angelou and Alice Walker, both of whom wrote about their lives in a way that transcends mere navel gazing and speaks volumes to larger truths. 

An author not as well known but whose books I believe fit in this category is Rick Bragg.  His memoir of his mother, All Over But the Shoutin', is one of the best non-fiction books I've read (which is a much smaller number than my fiction total).  It is a loving, almost reverent look at his childhood with his mother at the center.  Growing up poor in rural Alabama, Bragg took his experiences and used them as a journalist to bring humanity to stories on issues such as urban poverty.  This line from the book, describing the small town where he grew up, is an excellent example of why he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996: 

"This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven. This is a place where the song 'Jesus Loves Me' has rocked generations to sleep, and heaven is not a concept, but a destination."

It's Monday, What Are You Reading?

Happy Monday!  I hope that everyone had a wonderful, fulfilling reading week.  I had so much goodness this week-I finished The Divide, by Nicholas Evans.  I also got blog posts written for The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver, and Night, by Elie Wiesel.

I got a wonderful package from Sharon at Sharon's Garden of Book Reviews.  I won her Cozy Mystery Giveaway, and got a box full of books from her this weekend.  Every one is by a new-to-me author, and I am very excited for summer to get here so I can dive into that box head first!

Right now I am doing something I almost never do-reading more than one book at once.  I'm reading Push, by Sapphire.  I can tell you right now that the review is going to be hard to write.  It's a gripping story, but not easy to read at all.  I'm also reading City of Embers, a YA selection that my friend has been telling me to read for a while now.  And I'm still working on the anthology of motherhood essays entitled Confessions of the Other Mother, about non-biological lesbian moms.  Pretty interesting how diverse their experiences are.

 

Have a great reading week, everyone!

Night, Elie Wiesel

I'm not sure there are enough words in the English language to describe the horror, sadness, and desolation that is contained in the 109 pages of Night, Elie Wiesel's memoir of his time in the concentration camps.

In 1944, Germany is clearly losing World War II, and Hitler has escalated his plan to exterminate the Jews.  German troops begin to go into areas previously left pretty well alone, and round up Jews from the small towns in the countryside.  Wiesel's family, along with all of their neighbors, are rounded up and sent to Auschwitz.  Being loaded into boxcars, traveling for days with little food and water, watching the weak die, and being separated from this mother and sister, while terrible enough, was nothing compared to the horrors that confronted him and his father at the camp.

The most striking thing about this book was the spare language that Wiesel uses, and the complete heartwrenching sadness I felt while reading it.  Wiesel packs a lot of emotional wallop into a small number of pages.  I think that the fact that he writes about his experiences in the way that he does only adds to the mood of devestation and tragedy.  Frankly, the horrors of the camp don't need elaborate language or vivid metaphor.  A stark retelling is all that is needed to see the terrible price that those in the camps paid for the world's inability to stop the evil that was Hitler before he became powerful enough to wreak such destruction.  Perhaps the most chilling thing about Wiesel's story is how quickly the men he was imprisoned with became used to the deplorable conditions in which they found themselves.  Every day that they were not sent to the furnaces was a relief-they only had to go to their physically demanding and dangerous jobs where they were forced to work on little or no food, sick or injured, in the heat or freezing cold, to be abused and demeaned by the guards.  In the end I was left feeling that had the Russians not liberated the camps when they did, Wiesel and the rest of the prisoners would have eventually been worn away by brutality to nothing-no emotion, no intellect, no humanity left.

Big Hair and Popped Collars

Anyone coming of age in the 80s probably has fond memories of big hair, parachute pants, and popped collars.  In Jen Lancaster's last book, Pretty in Plaid, she recounts her metamorphosis from small-town Midwestern girl to fashion-forward, Prada-loving businesswoman.

The book begins when Jen is still Jenni, and she is living with her family in New Jersey.  It is the late 70s, and she is rockin' a retro-60's vibe in her hand-me-down fringe vests.  Before long, her father moves the family to a small town in Indiana because of his job, and her high-style Eastern-seaboard existence comes to a screeching halt.  Throughout the rest of the book she shares tales of her trials and triumphs through the clothes that signify each period of her life-jeans and t-shirts in elementary school, preppy khakis and polos in high school, sorority sweatshirts in college, and frumpy business suits at the beginning of her career in business.

I should start the review portion of this post by saying that I love Jen Lancaster.  I firmly believe that we are meant to be best friends and go out of fancy martinis while we snark about all of the ridiculous things in the world.  I have read two of her other books, Bitter is the New Black and Such a Pretty Fat, and other than the fact that she is a Republican I felt like I was reading something my businesswoman alter-ego (if I had such a thing) might have written.  That said, I did not enjoy this book as well as her others.  Not because of the focus on fashion, which is why one friend of mine did not like it, but because I think that I prefer the fully-formed Jen to the still-developing Jenni.  I still laughed out loud more than once during my read.  Her footnotes add to the hilarity rather than distract from it.  As someone who was a teenager in the 80s myself, I was transported back to my own big-hair days.  I too was one of those obnoxious know-it all honors students who wanted to run the world.  I too got to college and lost my mind for a while (though I took way less than the 11 years to finish that it took Jen).  I too waited tables for many years trying to keep my head above water.  I too had big curly hair that frizzed when it was humid.  Overall, while I wasn't quite as over the moon about this book as the others, I still loved it, and can't wait for her to write many more!

The Art of Cooking Dangerously

I suppose part of the reason for a joining a book club is to be forced (in the nicest possible way, of course), to read books that you would not otherwise have picked up on your own.  So it was with my books club's October selection, Julie and Julia by Julie Powell.  Admittedly, I tend to shy away from non-fiction in general.  When I read in my rather small amount of spare time I am usually trying to escape the stresses of everyday life.  Somehow reading the lates treatise on the war in Iraq or the inspirational story of some celebrity's battle with shoe addiction does not quite scream "relaxation" to me.  So whenever my book club chooses a non-fiction book I cringe a little.  However, my rather narcissistic insistence on being considered well-read usually overcomes my inherent reticence (with the notable exception of Sin in the Second City...it takes real skill to make the history of prostitution in my own city so boring and lifeless).  And at least this particular non-fiction book had the benefit of being made into a major motion picture that I actually wanted to see.

Julie and Julia turned out to be every bit as charming a book as the trailers make the movie out to be.  Julie Powell is someone I can relate to.  A democrat in a republican controlled world (though that particular nightmare is over for both of us at the moment).  A woman with ambitions who feels thwarted by circumstances completely (or mostly) outside of her control.  A person who takes on a crazy project just because she can (can you say "second masters degree"?).  And she is funny-with a kind of sarcastic wit that I appreciate (and sometimes indulge in myself).  The icing on the gateau?  Her obsession with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which I share, thanks to my best friend Rachel.

Reading the book at times made me question the sanity of my French forebears.  What sort of deranged person is the first to decide that boiling down calf hooves in your kitchen, and then eating the resultant gelatinous concoction was a good idea?  I mean really, who looks at a cow's feet and think "delish"?  Some sort of bovine fetishist, I can only assume.  But while the food often takes center stage in this book, with long descriptions of aspics and veal brains and deboned ducks, it is really the story of a dissatisfied secretary finding a way to create meaning in what appeared to be a rather meaningless existence.  The fact that she starts her journey on the heels of 9-11 only served to underscore the point.  I think that we as a country were struggling to find meaning in the wake of that tragic day, and deciding to take on a chaotic cooking project as an attempt to bring a modicum of control into a world that felt suddenly unmoored makes perfect sense to me.

The irony of me writing a book review on a blog about a book that was written because of a blog is not lost on me.  I think that it is one of the remarkable things about the way that we communicate in the 21st century.  Fifty years ago, this book would not have been published.  Fifty years ago, it wouldn't even have seemed strange for a woman to take on learning the art of French cooking.  In this beautiful myth we've created for ourselves about the American housewife of the mid-20th century, we would have nodded our heads in approval and felt guilty for not doing it ourselves.  Today, I can be glad that Julie blanched, sauteed, and pureed her way through Julia Child's masterpiece of home cookery.  The fact of her doing it, and writing about it in such an entertaining, self-deprecating way, means that now I never have to.  Trust me, reading about how to saute lamb kidneys in a red wine reduction sauce was enough for me-I'll leave the actual cooking and, more importantly, the tasting of it to the few, the brave, the Julie Powells of the world.