There will be no tricks in this tale. I tell you this so that you can relax. You’ll listen more closely if you aren’t flinching every other instant, waiting for the pratfall. You will not reach the end and suddenly learn I have been talking to my other soul or making a lullaby of my life for someone’s unborn brat. I find such things disingenuous. I have this imagined thing when I’m trying to read more authors of color where I worry that I’ll reach a point at which there are no more books by authors of color that I want to read.…
16 CommentsCategory: 4 Stars
I had to read How It Went Down in sections. It’s about a black teenager who is shot by a white man, and all the different characters — the witnesses, the families, friends — tell their perspectives of what happened on the day of Tariq’s death and in the aftermath of it. If any other author in the world had written this book, I wouldn’t have read it. But I trust Kekla Magoon from her wonderful, wrenching The Rock and the River, which is about teenage brothers and their participation (or lack of it) in the Black Panther Party. I read the first third in December, and then the…
30 CommentsThis has been the persistent pattern of how modern society has dealt with old age. The systems we’ve devised were almost always designed to solve some other problem. As one scholar put it, describing the history of nursing homes from the perspective of the elderly “is like describing the opening of the American West from the perspective of the mules; they were certainly there, and epochal events were certainly critical to the mules, but hardly anyone was paying very much attention to them at the time.” The excerpt I read from Being Mortal in the New Yorker dealt with the astonishing rarity…
31 CommentsWithout You There Is No Us is a read for Nonfiction November, hosted by the marvelous Kim (Sophisticated Dorkiness), Leslie (Regular Rumination), Katie (Doing Dewey), and Rebecca (I’m Lost in Books). Rebecca’s the host for this week, so head on over to her blog to see the nonfiction other bloggers have been reading and recommending! North Korea is an improbable circumstance, isn’t it? Whenever I think about North Korea, I’m surprised all over again. I’m like the grandmother in Emily Climbs who keeps insisting that a child can’t be lost in the nineteenth century. How can there be, in this…
24 CommentsNote: I received an advance ebook copy from the publisher for review consideration, through Netgalley. I’ve read this collection for the past three years now, and every time, the editor has been careful to include science writing on a range of topics. If Deborah Blum’s collection is perhaps a trifle heavy on What Our Hubris Hath Wrought on the planet and its occupants (and a trifle light on SPACE and the things that happen IN SPACE), it’s very little surprise. At this point, the consensus is that global warming is at this point irreversible or close to it and we…
17 Comments