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Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans by Kadir Nelson
Happy 280th birthday to George Washington today, even if his official federal holiday (since 1879 by an Act of Congress!) always falls on a non-birthdate: by the Julian calendar, GW was born February 11, on the Gregorian February 22 [those colonials changed calendars in 1752], but the official holiday is designated to recur annually on the third Monday of the month, which means the holiday will never actually fall on GW’s natal day! Since the 1980s, a nod to Lincoln (birthday February 12) was added, to make it Presidents’ Day – although for families with children, this nebulously named holiday has become an excuse for mid-winter break. Hope the long holiday was good for all. Oh, but I have digressed …!!
In the splendiferous Heart and Soul, the original George W. appears on page 12: he’s looking straight ahead, mounted on the back of a sleek horse on the banks of what is presumably the Potomac River … and standing beside him is a slave, with hat in hand, head slightly bowed, his profile filled with grave consternation.
Kadir Nelson, this year’s author award winner and illustrator honoree of the Coretta Scott King Book Award, is not rewriting history: George Washington’s life clearly would have not been George Washington’s life without slaves, either at home or on the battlefield. “Through the fruits of our labor and our volunteer soldiers, we had helped free America from England, and yet we were stuck in a country that kept most of us as slaves.”
Taking the welcoming, storytelling tone of an aging grandmother who has seen too much, Nelson has history to share: “No parent wants to tell a child that he was once a slave and made to do anther man’s bidding. Or that she had to swallow her pride and take what she was given, even though she knew it wasn’t fair. Our story is chock-full of things like this. Things that might you cringe, or feel angry,” the knowing elder explains. “But there are also parts that will make you proud, or even laugh a little. You gotta take the good with the bad, I guess. You have to know where you come from so you can move forward.”
From the early 1600s to the founding of a new country, from the horrors of plantation life to Lincoln’s War, from the failure of Reconstruction to the hopes for building freer lives in the Wild West, our storyteller recounts African American struggles and contributions to the founding, building, and growing of a country in flux. She wanders north with the Great Migration and to Harlem for jazz, glamour, and the vote for women. She survives the Great Depression and World War II, celebrates equal rights and the death of Jim Crow, and listens on the National Mall to “”I have a dream …’”
As thorough and personal as the story is, Kadir Nelson’s extraordinary pictures are what will linger and enlighten. Every page holds wonder and admiration: the tiny little boy in his tattered shirt standing in front of the slave quarters against a sky so impossibly blue; the searing portrait of Harriet Tubman, tired but determined against the rich hues of the falling dusk; a young woman standing behind her father in near-darkness, her encouraging hands on his shoulders as if gently willing him to read; the portrait of a southern family migrating north, dressed in their Sunday best with all their worldly possessions piled into and onto a dilapidated jalopy, the sheer joy of making magical music of a Harlem big band; and perhaps the most touching of all – the gnarled, wizened hands cradling a stars-and-stripes “I voted” button offered up as proof of survival and celebration.
“We have come a mighty long way, honey, and we still have a good ways to go, but that promise and the right to fight for it is worth every ounce of its weight in gold. It is our nation’s heart and soul.” AMEN to that …
Readers: Children, Middle Grade
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Filed under ..Children/Picture Books, .Nonfiction, African American
Last Airlift: A Vietnamese Orphan’s Rescue from War by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch
Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch is one of those mega-award-winning Canadian authors (with more than a dozen titles) who hasn’t crossed over our shared border (just yet!) with the same success. She’s best known for her historical novels for younger readers about what must be one of the most difficult subjects ever – children and war. Her latest, which debuted far north last fall, hits U.S. shelves next week (March already!). Airlift is Skrypuch’s first narrative nonfiction, the true story of Son Thi Anh Tuyet and her last days in her native Vietnam and her first days with her Canadian family.
Tuyet can’t remember life before she came to live in the Saigon orphanage with all the children, babies, and nuns. Her only memory of “outside” are occasional visits of a woman with a young boy, who may or may not have been her mother and brother. “‘After a while, they stopped coming.’”
On April 11, 1975, Tuyet is frantically packed into the back of a van with babies and toddlers strapped into makeshift boxes headed to the airport. She is one of 57 children on what will turn out to be the last Canadian airlift operation to save orphans from a war-torn Saigon on the verge of collapse. As an older child of 8 with a leg weakened by polio, Tuyet is convinced she’s been brought only to help care for the younger children; as long as she remains useful, perhaps she will not be sent back to the orphanage.
Her remarkable journey – filled with unfamiliar faces, words she cannot understand, a future that seems so uncertain – lands her with a family of her own. “‘You are my daughter,’” her new mother assures her even before she can understand the words, “‘Not my helper.’” “Grass … swing … play,” her new father teaches her. And “‘sister,’” her new siblings call her with comforting hugs and kisses.
Enhanced with documents and a surprising number of photographs, Airlift is a touching, multi-layered experience. The strength of Skrypuch’s storytelling shows strongest in the smallest details: Tuyet’s wonder at discovering that stars are real things in the sky, her knowing better than the adults that to quiet the screaming babies is to place them close together, her doubt about “dads … [who] didn’t seem very real [as] she had never actually seen one.”
In the ending “Author’s Note,” Skrypuch explains how her initially intended novel became Tuyet’s narrative: ” … I was going to piece together a story of one orphan based on the experiences of many. But as I recreated these experiences from my research, an interesting thing happened. In small flashes, Tuyet bagan to remember more. … When Last Airlift was complete, Tuyet was overwhelmed by the fact that it was, in fact, her own story that had been reclaimed.”
Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult
Published: 2012 (United States) Continue reading
The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey by Walter Mosley
At 91, Ptolemy Grey is “waiting to finally be a man.” as he writes in his last letter, addressed to his young charge and heir Robyn. The novel begins backwards with an “Afterward” that summarizes the whole of Ptolemy’s nine-decades-plus, but to understand why he’s sitting there “with a pistol under the cushion and a gold doubloon on the kitchen table,” you’ll have to unravel the almost-300 pages (or eight hours if you’re listening) that follow.
Ptolemy has dementia. He lives alone in an apartment in Los Angeles so cluttered (filthy and bug-infested, too) that he can’t use his own bedroom, and even worse his own bathroom. His only regular human contact has been with his grandnephew Reggie who used to come take care of him. Now Reggie’s dead, gunned down on a friend’s front steps.
At Reggie’s funeral, Ptolemy meets 17-year-old Robyn, an orphan living with his niece, who shows up at his front door and offers her company and help. Suspicious at first, Ptolemy allows Robyn to clear the detritus from his apartment (not to mention his heart and soul). They quickly become inseparable, their unlikely relationship settling somewhere between parent and child, and impossible lovers.
When Ptolemy is offered a chance to take an experimental drug that will give him temporary clarity, he grabs the opportunity to finally make sense – and peace – with the ghosts of his frightened past: his mentor Coydog who was brutally murdered, his beloved wife Sensia who continually broke his heart, the neighborhood addict Melinda who demands his money, and finally, to find out what happened to his grandnephew Reggie. Ptolemy’s memories can’t be separated from almost a century of destructive, racially-charged history brought so sharply into focus so you can’t look away. Ptolemy’s reprieve is brief, but ignorance is no longer an option for the reader …
Confession: This is the first book by the prolific Walter Mosley that I’ve ever finished; I didn’t actually read it myself – narrator Dominic Hoffman conjured the story in his smooth, inviting voice. I admit to the possibility I might not have reached the end this time, either – Ptolemy’s sudden backroom access to the experimental drugs is not particularly convincing, Ptolemy’s hazy insistence he’s made a deal with the Devil seems tiresomely derivative, Reggie’s murderer is so obvious you really wonder why Ptolemy needs fatal hallucinogens to figure that out, and the just-on-the-edge-of-skeezy reminders of the relationship between Ptolemy and a teenager young enough to be his great-great(!!)-granddaughter gets to be a bit much.
But, finish I had to because Ptolemy Grey turned out to be part of a tremendously insightful look into Alzheimer’s. And getting on in years, I needed the education. [Thanks again to my poet friend, who is famous for her writings on her own mother’s battle with the debilitating illness, most notably her Dementia Blog.]
If you choose to partake (and well you should if the topic is of interest – or a necessity? – to you), here’s the recommended path: Start with Alice LaPlante’s unforgettable Turn of Mind, then get yourself to a screening of the spectacular film A Separation, then check out the NPR report about a skin cancer drug that is working wonders on mice with Alzheimer’s. Then, and only then, pick up The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey … sometimes, timing really is everything.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, African American
Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante
On the kitchen wall is taped a large sign: “My name is Dr. Jennifer White. I am sixty-four years old. I have dementia. My son, Mark, is twenty-nine. My daughter, Fiona, twenty-four. A caregiver, Magdalena, lives with me.”
What else should you know without telling you too much …?
Dr. White was a renowned surgeon before she retired. Her specialty was hands. She keeps a notebook in which she makes records of what she remembers; other family and friends also contribute to the pages. Her best friend and neighbor Amanda is dead; her body was found with four fingers from her right hand severed. Dr. White’s husband James is also dead; he lost control of the car when he had a heart attack. Her stock statement reads $2.56 million, but she’s not sure if that’s a lot of money: “AAPL, IBM, CVR, ASF, SFR. The secret language of money.”
And that covers about the first 15 pages. Can you shout “WOW”??!!
A seasoned journalist and creative writing instructor at Stanford, Alice LaPlante used words to deal with her own mother’s Alzheimer’s. In an article in the U.K.’s Guardian, LaPlante explains she tried non-fiction, journaling, a short story, before settling on writing a mystery – a genre she does not read – after an offhand remark her husband made while watching Sherlock Holmes.
What emerges is a first novel for which superlatives like ‘astonishing,’ ‘stupendous,’ ‘stunning,’ just don’t do it enough justice. Part mystery, part thriller, part family saga, part medical journal, Turn of Mind is a book you need to get right now and start reading (or listening – Jean Reed Bahle’s narration is expertly paced, her almost sly tone creating a smoothness just perfect for a most unreliable narrator). Don’t stop until that devastating final sentence: “In the end, that is enough.”
Tidbit: I came to Mind by way of a poet friend (with whom I share a hometown and middle school) famous for her writings on her own mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s, most notably her Dementia Blog. The day I reached the final page and finally exhaled, I happened to join a few of my hens for A Separation, one of the very best films I’ve seen in years. No spoilers: watch it to recognize the links. On that same day still, NPR shared a report that a skin cancer drug was working wonders on mice with Alzheimer’s. And that night, to keep my brain cells connected a bit longer … I started The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey by Walter Mosley (also at my poet’s behest), in which certain drugs make a grace-filled, havoc-ridden (both!) appearance. Surreal synchronicity: stay tuned …
Readers: Adult
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Filed under ...Absolute Favorites, ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, Nonethnic-specific
Tropical Fish: Stories Out of Entebbe by Doreen Baingana
This interlinked story collection by Uganda-born, Stateside MFA-ed Doreen Baingana is a family affair that explores the lives of three sisters, their diverse paths, and their eventual return home. The two bookended stories introduce the family in the opening “Green Stones,” only to end with a much changed configuration of residents in the same house years later in “Questions of Home.” In between, the sisters grow up, move away, and make irrevocable choices …
In the Entebbe home of their youth, Christine, Rosa, and Patti witness the debauched, shameful disintegration of their once-powerful, internationally peripatetic businessman father. Their waiting mother, whose adoration for her husband turns to anger and disgust, endures. Each sister suffers through boarding school: Patti deals with the humiliation of constant hunger in “Hunger,” and Rosa learns the true meaning of ‘passion’ from a less-than-respected literature teacher in “Passion.”
Christine – who emerges as the primary narrator – recalls a disconnected affair with a Caucasian ex-pat living a far more luxurious life that he could ever have had back home in “Tropical Fish,” then explores her own American dream in “Lost in Los Angeles” where she learns to stop giving geography lessons to those too myopic to identify a country called Uganda. Christine’s reverse commute back to Entebbe eight years later in the final “Questions of Home” proves both jarring and familiar.
Set in the tumultuous time following the ouster of Idi Amin (who terrorized Uganda from 1971 to 1979), amidst the delicate reconstruction of a country in flux, Baingana creates an unflinching portrait of four women, who each claim their independence in different ways, but eventually come back together – much changed, one missing – to be a family once again.
Beyond Baingana’s well-deserved initial success – including the 2003 AWP Award Series in Short Fiction from the all-encompassing literary organization Association of Writers & Writing Programs, and the 2006 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in Africa – Fish remains her single title. The prowess of that debut, however, should ensure that she is an international writer to watch with great anticipation. Anyone with a direct line to her … do please tell her that her public is waiting, waiting, waiting!
Tidbit: Tropical Fish remains very much in the news! The collection was recently chosen as the Port Harcourt, Nigeria-based Rainbow Book Club pick-of-the-month. Doreen Baingana will be reading in Port Harcourt at the Le Meridien Hotel, Ogeyi Palace tomorrow, February 19, 2012 at 4 p.m.! Wish I could be there!
Readers: Adult
Published: 2005, 2006 (new paperback edition with additional preface and discussion guide) Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Short Stories, African, African American
Migrant by Maxine Trottier, illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault
Here’s an immigration story that took me by total surprise: German-speaking Mennonites from Mexico who work as migrant laborers in Canada. To understand just how many levels of peripatetic displacement that involves, you have to read this fascinating (mega-award-winning!) book backwards.
“Canada and the United States were built by people who valued freedom and opportunity. That is part of the reason so many came to North America in search of a fresh beginning in spite of the challenges,” writes Maxine Trottier in the story’s afterword. Those opportunity seekers include seasonal laborers, also called migrants, who remain a controversial part of today’s North American labor force.
Among those migrants are Mennonites who left Canada in the 1920s and moved to Mexico: “There they hoped to farm, withdraw from the modern world and find religious freedom.” They kept their Canadian citizenship, which allowed them to return to Canada to work when their Mexican farms could not sustain them. That migration continues today … because “[t]heir farms in Mexico, while no longer successful enough to support them, are still their homes.”
Anna is her family’s youngest child. She “feels like a bird,” as her family travels north in the spring and back south every fall, “chasing the sun, following the warmth.” She wonders what a “stay in one place”-sort-of-life might be like, but she knows she’s more like a jack rabbit who makes homes in abandoned burrows just as her family moves into farmhouses “filled with the ghosts of last year’s workers.”
Too young for labor, she watches over her worker bee family. She sleeps curled like a kitten with her sisters, while her puppy-like brothers snooze in another room. Her large family endures the local stares, while Anna peeks through the apples in the grocery store filled with people and things she doesn’t understand. She imagines feeling the solidity of the trees around her, which stay grounded through the fall and snow, but when the geese fly away, “with them goes Anna … like a feather in the wind.”
Illustrator Isabelle Arsenault who also brought her whimsical magic to one of my favorites, Spork by Kyo Maclear, imbues Anna with innocent curiosity in her little red dress with her matching red cheeks. Moments of Anna’s imagination come vividly to life, as the geese sport various headscarves and hats just like her family, the giant jack rabbit bounds out the door with last year’s ghosts looking on, the kitty-sisters are sleepily dazzled by the moon and the stars, while the puppy-brothers lie sprawled every which way on a “blanket that barely covers them all.”
The final spread – especially touching – of the large departing family, some of them already off the page, captures Anna mid-air as she jumps from a tree swing in answer to a sister’s wave to go: Anna and her family, closely reassembled, begin their unified journey back home.
Readers: Children
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Filed under ..Children/Picture Books, .Fiction, Canadian, Latin American
No Longer Human (vol. 3) by Usamaru Furuya, based on the novel by Osamu Dazai, translated by Allison Markin Powell
The three-part manga adaptation of Dazai Osamu‘s classic semi-autobiographical novel of human disconnect concludes here with utter fear and loathing. To catch up to this point, click here for the first two volumes.
Yozo Oba, now 22, is living so blissfully with his lovely young wife Yoshino that Usamaru Furuya the online voyeur scoffs, “… the unexpected happy developments disappointed me.” But, of course, he doesn’t stay disappointed for long.
The lovebirds have enjoyed a year of true happiness together. He’s a rising manga artist, and she helps him produce his panels. He’s stopped drinking and smoking. He’s contentedly basking in Yoshino’s complete and irresolute trust in him.
Into their idyllic nest arrives bad-boy Horiki to deliver a letter from Yozo’s past. All too quickly, Yozo succumbs to his old vices, easily dragged down by Horiki’s envy. Horiki calls Yozo a “criminal” for his many past misdeeds: “The word made my heart skip a beat. Sooner or later, the day may come for me to pay for all I’ve done.”
That same night, the descent begins. Yoshino is brutally attacked while Yozo watches in paralyzed horror. Yozo’s anguish turns him gray overnight. His disgust with humanity – but most especially the utter loss of Yoshino’s innocent trust in him – sends him into a destructive spiral from which he will never emerge.
By volume’s end, the story diverges from Dazai’s original novel, as Furuya the writer concludes with his own framing story: as the online reader Furuya finishes Yozo’s diary, he comes upon an “Afterword” from Horiki, who has put the diary online in hopes of finding a now-disappeared Yozo. In the days that follow, Furuya can’t get Yozo out of his head, and seeks out the various characters in the diary, only to find them all too real. “‘I want to draw this man …,’” and so the adaptation comes full circle.
The final pages of the trilogy end with another “Afterword,” most sobering of all as author Furuya reveals his own high school identification with the suicidal Dazai. “I drew the last scene with Yozo, where he may have ascended to a painless dimension, as faintly salvational. … [T]he original novel … ends with an astonishing, bewildering scene of terrifying, weak humanity that pushes the reader away,” Furuya explains. “I sincerely hope that those who feel the manga is too dark will go and read the novel. A despair that I was in the end unable to convey can be found within its pages …”
Furuya writes, ironically, from his home in Mitaka City near the Tamagawa Canal: “It feels like a thread that connects me to Osamu Dazai, who drowned himself in it.” Whew … goosebumps, anyone?
Readers: Young Adult (with caution), Adult
Published: 2012 (United States) Continue reading
The Thief by Fuminori Nakamura, translated by Satoko Izumo and Stephen Coates
Handpicked by Nobel Laureate Kenzaburō Ōe for his eponymous Ōe Prize in 2009, Nakamura – who has also previously garnered many of Japan’s other top awards (Noma Literary New Face Prize, the coveted Akutagawa Prize) – makes his Stateside debut-in-translation.
Disguised as fast-paced, shock-fueled crime fiction, Thief resonates even more as a treatise on contemporary disconnect and paralyzing isolation. The protagonist – a virtuoso pickpocket with Robin Hood-tendencies – agrees to participate in what initially seems to be a simple robbery for a lucrative fee, only to get inescapably embroiled with the Tokyo crime world’s omnipotent power elite. Meanwhile, his last tenuous connection to society is a desperate young boy forced to clumsily shoplift by his addicted, prostitute mother. With nowhere left to run, the thief must barter his life with a labyrinthine test of his thieving prowess.
Verdict: Mystery/crime aficionados with exacting literary standards, as well as readers familiar with already-established-in-translation Japanese writers Miyuki Miyabe (Shadow Family), Natsuo Kirino (Out, Grotesque), and Keigo Higashino (Naoko, The Devotion of Suspect X), will especially enjoy discovering Nakamura.
Review: “Fiction,” Library Journal, February 15, 2012
Readers: Adult
Published: 2012 (United States) Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Translation, Japanese
Lovetorn by Kavita Daswani
Ah, this day of mislaid Hallmark hearts … meet Shalini who has had much of her future decided for her – a rather pleasant, happy one at that – by age 3. She’s lived all her life in the family compound in Bangalore, home to 37 family members spread over four generations. She’s been engaged to wonderful Vikram since she was 3, and he was 6. Thirteen years later, they remain a perfect couple, best friends who are committed and adoring, both inextricably linked to each other’s lives.
Now Shalini’s father has a new job in California and the family arrives for a two-year residency in what seems to be an alien world. Shalini’s father and her younger sister Sangita adjust almost effortlessly to the more-than-usual culture shock. In contrast, Shalini’s immersion into American high school life is painful and embarrassing (the resident mean girls actually drop a box of hair remover on Shalini’s desk!), made even more so for missing Vikram so much. Shalini’s mother suffers most of all, completely unable to adjust to an isolated new life away from the bustling family compound, and literally withdraws alone to her darkened room.
With help from Renuka, a new friend who seems to easily balance both her Indian and American cultures, Shalini soon begins to find her voice (and even manages to thank the queen bees for their depilatory efforts). Gingerly stepping into her new life bit by bit, Shalini’s young heart starts to beat faster than she’s ever experienced for her classmate Toby. What’s an engaged girl to do?
Ethnic chick-lit favorite Kavita Daswani offers another easy-breezy teen read with quite an interesting cultural twist of a 21st-century arranged marriage. Daswani gives a nod to her “cousin … in Bangalore, who … confirmed to me that girls like Shalini were real.” Certainly Daswani captures Shalini’s ‘stranger-in-a-strange-land’ experiences with heartfelt authenticity. Perhaps the less convincing depictions belong to Shalini’s mother – her depressions, her treatment, her failure to mother – and ultimately seem out of place with the rest of the otherwise engaging novel.
Tidbit: The back cover copy describes Lovetorn as a “Bollywood twist on a Sarah Dessen novel” which has me a bit befuddled, probably because I admit having never read a Dessen title. Google-ing didn’t turn up much insight to the comparison (the summaries of Dessen’s books on her website maybe suggest a vague similarity with Dessen’s The Truth about Forever?), so if anyone out there is a YA expert, do enlighten me!
Readers: Young Adult
Published: 2012 Continue reading
Voice of a Dream by Glaydah Namukasa
Nanfuka wants nothing more than to finish her education and become a nurse – the first in her village. While still a child herself, the teenager is suddenly forced to leave school and thrust into adult responsibilities when she is called home as her father dies from AIDS. With her mother missing, Nanfuka is now in charge of her four younger siblings, including a baby sister with AIDS who is clearly wasting away.
Her paternal Aunt Naka is only too ready to marry Nanfuka off to the highest bidder, send the other children away, and sell the family’s land. Her neighbors, too, seem to want to see Nanfuka fail, taunting her with her own dreams of accomplishment. Thankfully, Nanfuka has other allies, including Nurse Kina from school who offers encouraging solutions, and even the school lothario Sendi who changes his cowboy swagger and proves himself worthy of Nanfuka’s friendship.
With resilience, Nanfuka manages to maintain her independence while keeping her family together. The deus ex machina ending gives the story an almost fairytale unreality, although Nanfuka will surely continue to face future challenges in achieving her determined dream.
Ugandan writer Glaydah Namukasa won the Senior Award in the Macmillan Writer’s Prize for Africa in 2006 for Dream. Just 25 when her slim novel was chosen, Namukasa’s youth is clearly evident in her plain and blunt writing, although it also exhibits a naïve freshness. Her literary journey is certainly one to watch.
Tidbit: When U.K.-based international publishing mega-giant Macmillan closed its African operations in 2011 after paying £11.2M in fines over fraud, the annual Writer’s Prize for Africa, as well as other programs supporting African education and literature in East and West Africa, disappeared. With diminishing access and opportunities for African writers to connect with international audiences, organizations such as FEMRITE, the Uganda Women Writers’ Association to which writers like Namukasa belong, and honors such as The Caine Prize for African Writing, will hopefully continue to grow in prominence and reach.
Readers: Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2006 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, ..Young Adult Readers, .Fiction, African
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