The President and the Freedom Fighter

The President and the Freedom Fighter: Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Their Battle to Save America's Soul by Brian Kilmeade
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book definitely fills in some holes that my high school history textbook glossed over. I had no idea Lincoln was so political, that while he didn't believe in slavery personally, he still didn't think of Blacks as equals (or friends until much later). And while I had heard about Fredrick Douglass I didn't know many details of his personal life, or that Black troops played such an important role in the Civil War, and that Douglass was a pivotal person in their formation and recruitment. Well-written and eye-opening.

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Normal People

 

Normal People by Sally Rooney
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There's no denying that Rooney is a good writer. She has a nimble way of toggling between descriptions and interior dialogue. She also has a good grasp of the otherness we can feel within ourselves as we try to figure out who we really are. Both characters experience being "out" with the prevailing crowd, and being "in" with others. Rooney explores that dichotomy and each character's reaction with that. Marianne and Connell are each other's anchors, sometimes grounding each other, sometimes causing the other to sink. Unfortunately, perhaps unavoidably, sex gets mixed in with it all. While I felt I could see Connell's character arc, I felt like some integral part of Marianne's growth got glossed over. (view spoiler)[ How did she feel when Connell threatened her brother? Did she finally feel like she was worthy of love? At the end, she still seemed to be submitting to Connell's desires (to go to grad school) rather than showing she was finally strong enough to stand on her own. (hide spoiler)]


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suggests to Connell that the same imagination he uses as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them.

everyone knew who he was already, and there was never any need to introduce himself or create impressions about his personality. If anything, his personality seemed like something external to himself, managed by the opinions of others, rather than anything he individually did or produced. Now he has a sense of invisibility, nothingness, with no reputation to recommend him to anyone.

Their feelings were suppressed so carefully in everyday life, forced into smaller and smaller spaces, until seemingly minor events took on insane and frightening significance.

Not for the first time Marianne thinks cruelty does not only hurt the victim, but the perpetrator also, and maybe more deeply and more permanently. You learn nothing very profound about yourself simply by being bullied; but by bullying someone else you learn something you can never forget.

One Day

 

One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America by Gene Weingarten
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a the equivalent of a journalism triple crown. It was entertaining--each chapter dealt with a different story but they were all intriguing and thought provoking in their own way. Weingarten is talented at making even day to day drama engaging. It was also journalism at its best. How he found out the things that happened on that day to start with must have been challenging in some instances, and then he dug into each story to talk about its pertinence and its breadth, so the reader is filled in on not just the story but the background and place in culture, politics, etc.(There are a few times when he may have overshot a bit and tried to make a story more than it was). And then for the coup de grace, Weingarten illustrates through all these stories, that each day is a building block. It could be the start of something, the end of something, or a turning point along the way, but we won't know until its in the past. "The past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, & thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past"--Virginia Woolf


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The God of Journalism is just. He rewards effort. Time and again in my life He comes through for me, but only after I decide to conduct that last interview, the one I don’t really think I need, or badger someone more than I’m entirely comfortable with, or stay at a scene longer than I’d planned, just to see what happens.

Such wounds—insults in the curiously mannered lexicon of medicine—

The celebration was somewhat disproportionate to the accomplishment; the operation was technically not all that difficult, except in the degree of nerve it took to attempt it.

Craig Peyer had betrayed his badge, and it then betrayed him.

“The government issued you things, they gave you a place to live, they gave you whatever they felt you needed. You became entitled, dependent, compliant, and complacent. You were kind of on perpetual welfare—your basics are taken care of, but you are not well off. You learned to accept that. You remained a child. When my parents arrived here in 1979, my father was forty and my mother was thirty, and they didn’t know to put money in the bank, they didn’t know what real estate was. The adjustment was apocalyptic. It gave them a feeling of cultural incompetence.”

Each moment becomes once again just another in a series of unremarkable moments, instead of a soul-searing blast of the inexpressible wonder of being.

Death of a Rainmaker

 

Death of a Rainmaker: A Dust Bowl Mystery by Laurie Loewenstein
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Great title. Fun read. It's not that shocking, or twisty, as a detective story. It's pretty straight-forward and the characters are all a little stock-board, with a twinge of sentimentality. Where it shines is the setting and details of the dust-bowl and Depression-era Oklahoma. I haven't read very many books in this setting and reading about the dust storms, the veterans issues from WWI, the Civilian Conservation Corp, even how the movie houses ran, were all interesting. Read it as a historical novel with a detective story thrown in.

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There is no man more hopeful than a farmer.

Hazel had fed her family three times a day on that china, had memorized every petal on every flower as she washed, dried, and stacked.  And now they were nothing more than secondhand plates to some stranger, wiped clean of meaning. 

The Yellow House

The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An interesting premise of a memoir: the history of the house you grew up in. So many things I enjoyed from this perspective: Broom's rumination on how the physical place you grew up in affects who you are; her frank observations of how where she was from affected how people treated her and her family; the stories of her family and how they survived Katrina; the effect not actually having a home has on some of her family after it is demolished after the hurricane. Other things were harder to navigate: there are a lot of children, and unfortunately only a few become memorable (like Carl) so when she mentions other names I am completely lost on who they were; great pictures of her parents but almost none of her as she grows up (which again may have helped with keeping track of who everyone was); a little more editing would have kept the story a little tighter and made the points more easily accessible.

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In Burundi, I was l'etranger , without language; I was without the sound of my voice.

Calling places by what they originally were, especially when the landscape is marred, is one way to fight erasure.

Pride

 

Pride by Ibi Zoboi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Pride takes Pride and Prejudice almost literally with a modern, Haitian-Dominican twist. Because it hews so closely to the original, the differences stick out and the genius is how it becomes a new relevant text. The issue becomes how class is dealt within the black community, especially among the Brooklyn neighborhood residents who are being pushed out by gentrification. But there is still plenty of teenage angst--college applications, block parties, and poetry slams to take in. The addition of Santerian traditions adds another layer of culture to this multi-ethnic update. For a remake of a classic, this one holds up.

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Educated

 

Educated by Tara Westover
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One of the most unique memoirs I've read. Westover gives a candid account of growing up in unusual circumstances, and does so knowing its distinctiveness yet not downplaying or exaggerating its difference. So many crazy things happen, but she also leaves room for movement in her own memory, letting us know how others there remember it differently. Her accomplishments are amazing especially when she recounts the things she did not know--not only facts but how to study or how to interact with other students. It is only as she gets older that the memoir feels less authentic somehow. The actions of her parents are puzzling and Westover doesn't seem to give any theories about their motivations. Did they believe her brother because he is a male, or because they need him for the business, or because he never left? Does she not understand the reasons either or is there something she's not telling us?

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The past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time.  It expands later, & thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past--Virginia Woolf

Our lives were a cycle--the cycle of the seasons--circles of perpetual change that, when complete, meant nothing had changed at all.

But Shawn had more power over me than I could possibly have imagined.  He had defined me to myself, and there's no greater power than that. 

"The wind is just the wind.  You could withstand these gusts on the ground, so you can withstand them in the air.  There is no difference.  Except the difference you make in your mind."

"You are not fool's gold, shining only under a particular light.  Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were.  It was always you.  Not in Cambridge.  In you.  You are gold.  And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are.  It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself--even gold appears dull in some lights--but that is an illusion.  And it always was."

I know only this: that when my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she wished she had been, she became that mother for the first time.