Tag Archives: Race

April 16, 2013 · 12:45 pm

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

ZeitounClearly I waited too long to read this book, even though it sat ready on my shelves and on my iPod for years. Before I lament further, you should know that if you choose to go audible, Firdous Bamji doesn’t disappoint; he remains one of the very few narrators whose name will make me pick up a book over that of the title and author.

So why the whinge-ing? I’m one of those readers who doesn’t like family trees in the beginning of books because I don’t want to know that Tom and Sally get married before they’re even born. I don’t like maps with the route clearly marked because then I’ll know that Joe got out of Dodge but didn’t make it to Paradise. What’s the point of reading to the final page if you already know what happens?

All that means that if you read the news, then you might already know what happens after the events contained in Dave Eggers‘ ‘best of’-lists-making, much lauded, true (-enough) Katrina title, Zeitoun. If you are one of the blessed few who know nothing, then please do NOT start a google search! I fervently wish I could have read this without bias …

As a story, Zeitoun is exciting and engaging, with only a few minor faltering moments (a few too many pages of waiting – for Katrina, for news, for answers). A Syrian Muslim by birth, an American citizen by choice, a successful New Orleanian businessman by tenacity, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, who is known by his easier-to-pronounce last name, runs a painting contracting company with his American wife Kathy, who became a hijab-wearing convert to Islam before she met Zeitoun. The company’s ubiquitous logo sports a rainbow – the significance of which was originally unknown to Zeitoun – which inadvertently attracted gay clients, although other potential clients stayed away and a few workers even left the company. Once made aware of the symbolism, Zeitoun stayed firm: “Anyone who had a problem with rainbows, he said, would surely have trouble with Islam.”

When Katrina hit, Kathy and the couple’s four kids had already left New Orleans. Zeitoun stayed back to keep an eye on the business, the family’s home, and their many other properties. He boarded his canoe in the disastrous aftermath helping others, saving the lives of both people and pets. And then, without cause or warning, he was arrested in one of his own rental houses. He was held in the Greyhound bus station-turned-makeshift-jail without being charged for three days, then sent to Hunt Correctional Center – a maximum-security prison – for 23 more, where he was not allowed even a single phone call.

Meanwhile, Kathy and the kids were in Phoenix with Kathy’s childhood best friend, desperately searching for any news about Zeitoun, all the while fielding frantic worrying from Zeitoun’s internationally dispersed family. The personal losses Zeitoun suffered after Katrina were exponentially magnified by the theft of his basic civil rights as an American citizen fueled by post-9/11 paranoia at the hands (fists, feet, pepper-spray) of the very people the U.S. Government sent to protect the disaster victims. Lest you think Zeitoun was a lone target, Eggers includes even more “absurd” stories, topped by the arrest of Merlene Maten, a 73-year-old diabetic woman held at Hunt’s sister prison for retrieving a sausage out of her own cooler from her own parked car.

Zeitoun should have been a moving tale about a local hero within a shared witnessing of outrage against the miscarriage of justice in the wake of a natural disaster. If the story could have ended in 2009 when the book was published, it surely would have remained a beacon of hope and inspiration. Alas, history (or should I say, ‘his story’) will prove otherwise.

Ironically, in this morning’s New York Times‘ leading article about yesterday’s horrific tragedy, “Blasts at Boston Marathon Kill 3 and Injure 100,” an unnamed “Saudi man” gets two mentions as having been singled out, in spite of repeated claims that no suspects are yet in custody. Over at the Times‘ Op-Ed page, in “Living Through Terror, in Rawalpindi and Boston,” a medical resident writes, “And then, as we worked our way through the dazed throngs in Back Bay, I realized that not only was I a victim of terror, but I was also a potential suspect. As a 20-something Pakistani male with dark stubble (an ode more to my hectic schedule as a resident in the intensive-care unit than to any aesthetic or ideology), would I not fit the bill?” Any doubts? Read Zeitoun.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2009

Leave a Comment

Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Nonfiction, Syrian American

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,

March 23, 2013 · 10:11 am

Mudbound by Hillary Jordan

MudboundI think I was somehow predestined to read Mudbound when I did: just after I finished Barbara Kingsolver‘s mightily disappointing Flight Behavior, I turned next to Hillary Jordan‘s 2008 debut novel. While searching for an image of the book cover to load here, I noticed the golden sticker – an award nod for being the “winner of the Bellwether Prize for Fiction.” Timing is everything, right? – because the Bellwether (which morphed into the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction in 2012) was founded and funded by none other than Kingsolver herself.

In case you’re starting to wonder, here’s the verdict: Mudbound is the far better title on the page, and stuck in the ears, as well. You’ll find no anemic, strangely accented, self-narration here; instead, a full cast voices the multiple narrators, with especially effective performances by Kate Forbes as the controlled Laura, Ezra Knight as desperately proud Ronsel, Brenda Pressley as the stalwartly tragic Florence. Mudbound proves to be one of the those rare assured debuts that send you instantly looking for more: luckily, Jordan has another title I’ve already iPod-loaded.

Mudbound opens with death: two brothers, Henry and Jamie, are digging their father Pappy’s grave. The power of a dead man to ooze such vitriolic hate over the 300-plus pages that follow is a horrific reminder of the worst in mankind. World War II is over, and the Americans who return home are both victorious and maimed, most deeply by scars invisible to the eye. In the deep South of the Mississippi Delta, the McAllan cotton farm – owned by land-loving Henry and his city-raised wife Laura – welcomes two veterans, Henry’s much younger brother Jamie and Ronsel Jackson, the oldest son of Henry’s tenant sharecropper. Ronsel’s father Hap works Henry’s land; his mother Florence helps Laura in the rustic farmhouse. Both Jamie and Ronsel are decorated war heroes, and yet Ronsel’s dark skin will damn him to abusive treatment without cause.

Jamie, Laura, Ronsel, Henry, Florence, and Hap each take narrative turns, and yet the story is driven by Pappy’s inescapable hate … with heinous consequences. The last few chapters of the book are unrelenting nightmares, once read/heard/imagined, never to be erased. And yet somehow, with Pappy finally in the ground, hope might prevail: “Might even find something like happiness. That’s the ending we want, you and me both. I’ll grant you it’s unlikely, but it is possible.”

Sometimes that possibility is all that keeps us going …

Readers: Adult

Published: 2008

6 Comments

Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, African American, Nonethnic-specific

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

February 26, 2013 · 9:53 am

The Lions of Little Rock by Kristin Levine

Lions of Little Rock1958, Little Rock, Arkansas: A year has passed since nine courageous African American students – history’s “Little Rock Nine“ – integrated Central High School. Just days before the new school year is scheduled to begin that September 15, then-Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus closed the city’s three high schools rather than adhere to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to continue integration.

Not directly affected herself, Marlee, 12, starts middle school. She’s gifted with numbers, but has trouble with words … especially when she has to speak them out loud. Her excruciating shyness keeps her voice locked inside: “… I’m not stupid, I’m scared.” Then she meets Liz, the new girl, who immediately stands up to the class queen bee, but with such delightful aplomb that she is instantly everyone’s friend, including Marlee. In the midst of working on a school project – which Liz has convinced Marlee that Marlee can and will present to the whole class in her own voice! – Liz disappears. The truth is highly disturbing: Liz is barred from school … because in spite of her light skin, she is black. Marlee learns the ugly reality of “passing.”

Life at home becomes increasingly unstable. Her older brother has left home for college. Her older sister – and greatest ally – has been sent to live with their grandmother so she can continue high school elsewhere. Her parents are fighting more and more – seemingly arguing opposite sides of the integration divide. Citing her safety in an already volatile situation, both parents forbid Marlee from any contact with Liz. Then the family’s maid’s teenage son gets arrested for a crime he didn’t commit – and Marlee knows he’s innocent because she knows who’s really guilty. Little by little, she realizes that doing the right thing sometimes means you’ve got to start with doing more wrong.

Kristin Levine – whose mother was born in Little Rock – has constructed a remarkable novel, so intricately layered and yet perfectly pieced together. Beyond its feat of page-turning storytelling (track-whooshing, too, if you choose to listen to Julia Whelan’s excellent narration), Lions also is an outstanding history lesson, made even more extraordinary by its lack of finger-pointing judgment. Beyond the huge public moment in 1957 that was Little Rock integration, Levine returns to the citizens’ everyday experiences after the national news cameras turned off: “Many citizens of Little Rock were embarrassed that the world saw only the hate and bigotry in their town,” she writes in the “Author’s Note” at book’s end. “In contrast, by 1958-59, some people in Little Rock had started to speak out … when the city seemed to find a voice.” That voice Levine entrusts to young Marlee, who learns to use it with deliberate tenacity and unswerving courage.

Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult

Published: 2012

Leave a Comment

Filed under ..Middle Grade Readers, ..Young Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, African American

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,

February 10, 2013 · 10:20 am

The Last Summer of the Death Warriors by Francisco X. Stork

Last Summer of the Death WarriorsWhen Pancho Sanchez arrives at St. Anthony’s Home, his 17-year-old self has already survived too much death, and yet he’s planning on more. The last of his family – his mentally challenged 20-year-old sister – was found dead in a motel room. While the police insist what happened was an accident, Pancho knows his sweet sister was murdered … and with no one left (their father died just three months ago, their mother years before when they were still young children), he has nothing more to lose.

And then he meets D.Q.

Daniel Quentin – “but everyone calls me D.Q.” – is on an impossible quest (Don Quixote, anyone?), mainly because he’s dying … of cancer. He’s been writing his “Death Warrior Manifesto” – “‘I’m not crazy about the name … because it has all sorts of negative implications. ‘Life Warrior’ is probably more accurate because the manifesto is about life, but ‘Death Warrior’ is more mysterious-sounding.’ And he inexplicably chooses Pancho (wasn’t Don Quixote’s sidekick Sancho Panza?) to be his fellow warrior. “‘The first rule is: No whining,’” he insists.

When an experimental treatment becomes available in Albuquerque, D.Q insists Pancho accompany him. Pancho readily agrees, as he’s managed to track down his sister’s killer to an Albuquerque address. Waiting there for D.Q. will be lovely Marisol, who works at the aptly named Casa Esperanza, a care facility for young cancer patients. Waiting, too, is D.Q.’s mother – surprise! he’s not an orphan, after all – who abandoned her son once before but is desperate to redeem herself by saving him this time.

As memorable as this novel is, you can’t believe how much heavier its imprint becomes on your heart, long after you finish it. If you choose to stick the story in your ears, D.Q. and Pancho’s voices won’t stop ringing: narrator Ryan Gesell is both sensitive and controlled, even as the punches (literally) fly.

Author extraordinaire Francisco X. Stork (oh, Marcelo in the Real World, be still my heart!) deals with Big Themes – life, death, love! – with patience and even humor, but he also seamlessly weaves in matters of race, ethnicity, haves vs. have-nots, parenthood, mental illness, and more. Before you close the book, turn to the title once more: that word “Last” keeps resonating, not only for what you’ve just read, but for what gets left unsaid.

Readers: Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2010

1 Comment

Filed under ..Adult Readers, ..Young Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, Latino/a

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,

January 30, 2013 · 3:00 pm

The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by Jeanne Theoharis

Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa ParksAlready designated “definitive political biography” on its back cover, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by Brooklyn College political science professor Jeanne Theoharis will reside in my personal reading history as the most difficult book I’ve ever reviewed. Never before – and hopefully never again – have I faced such a vast divide between significant content and frustrating execution. As the most exhaustively researched biography thus far on Rosa Parks, Theoharis’ new title is inarguably an essential addition to any library or classroom, and yet readers will need serious patience to sift through tedious repetition, fragmented chronology, and countless “might have/could have” assumptions to reach the final page.

Fable, myth, caricature are not words historically linked to Rosa Parks, who is publicly remembered as the quiet, tired seamstress whose refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus sparked the U.S. civil rights movement. When she died at 92 in 2005, Parks became the first woman and second African American to have her body lie in state in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda; 40,000 – including President and Mrs. George W. Bush – bore witness, with additional mourners paying tribute at overflowing memorials held in Montgomery, and Detroit, where Parks spent more than half of her life.

“[T]he woman who emerged in the public tribute bore only a fuzzy resemblance to Rosa Louise Parks,” Theoharis proves. “[R]epeatedly defined by one solitary act on the bus,” Theoharis insists Parks was “stripped of her lifelong history of activism and anger at American injustice.” Instead, “the public spectacle provided an opportunity for the nation to lay rest a national heroine and its own history of racism.” In other words: 50 years earlier, this tired woman couldn’t sit on a bus, but look where she’s lying now.

Theoharis “was captivated and then horrified by the national spectacle made of her death.” She gave a talk about “its caricature of [Parks] and, by extension, its misrepresentation of the civil rights movement,” which she was asked to turn into an article: “It became clear how little we actually knew about Rosa Parks.” Even Rosa Parks: A Life, the biography by lauded historian Douglas Brinkley, “is “pocket-sized, un-footnoted,” while the autobiography Parks wrote with Jim Haskins, Rosa Parks: My Story, is targeted for young adult readers. “[T]he lack of scholarly monograph on Parks,” Theoharis observes, “is notable.”

More than a personal biography, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Theoharis uses the honorific Mrs. to add “a degree of dignity, distance, and formality to mark that she is not fully ours as a nation to appropriate”) is a political reclamation of Parks’ almost-70 years of activism. As the grandchild of slaves, Parks knew “[f]rom an early age, … ‘we were not free.’” Pushed by her mother, a teacher, towards an education, “her discovery of black history in high school was transformative.” Family responsibilities kept Parks from finishing 11th grade; she wanted to be nurse or social worker, never a teacher after the “’humiliation and intimidation’” she watched her mother endure. Her husband Raymond Parks was “’the first real activist I ever met.’”

Her acts of resistance began small and early – she refused to drink from segregated water fountains – then public and even life-threatening – she registered to vote and assisted others “despite enormous poll taxes and the unfair registration tests.” She was Montgomery’s NAACP secretary, long aligned with controversial activist E.D. Nixon; she experienced interracial leadership training and race equality at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. [... click here for more]

Review: Christian Science Monitor, January 30, 2013

Readers: Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2013

Leave a Comment

Filed under ..Adult Readers, ..Young Adult Readers, .Biography, .Nonfiction, African American

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

January 29, 2013 · 4:16 pm

Jefferson’s Sons: A Founding Father’s Secret Children by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

Jefferson's SonsLet me start with what has been deemed as historical record. According to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation – which not only owns and operates Jefferson’s legendary home, Monticello, but maintains the most comprehensive website focused on “Monticello, Jefferson, his family, and his times” – this is the official word on Jefferson’s relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings: “The claim that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings, a slave at Monticello, entered the public arena during Jefferson’s first term as president, and it has remained a subject of discussion and disagreement for two centuries. Based on documentary, scientific, statistical, and oral history evidence, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (TJF) Research Committee Report on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (January 2000) remains the most comprehensive analysis of this historical topic. Ten years later, TJF and most historians believe that, years after his wife’s death, Thomas Jefferson was the father of the six children of Sally Hemings mentioned in Jefferson’s records, including Beverly, Harriet, Madison, and Eston Hemings.”

That the man who wrote the very words of the Declaration of Independence – “all men are created equal” – not only kept slaves (he owned some 600 human beings during his lifetime), but even fathered at least six slave children, has been a “Paradox of Liberty” for hundreds of years. [If you're interested in finding out more, be sure to check out the online exhibition, presented by the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, in partnership with TJF.]

Author Kimberly Brubaker Bradley meticulously takes Jefferson’s history as it was officially recorded at the time of her writing – while clearly acknowledging that historical evidence is not immutable – and creates an unforgettable story (soulfully read by Adenrele Ojo who correctly says ‘Monti-cello‘ like the instrument!) of the complicated relationships within a significant, mixed-race family. Sally Hemings’ children are a secret that everyone in Monticello knows, but no one ever acknowledges: her four surviving children – three sons and one daughter – call their father “Master Jefferson,” just as all the other plantation slaves must do.

Focusing on three characters – including Jefferson’s sons Beverly and Madison – Bradley imagines the lives of the slave children, growing up – and serving – their white relatives; although protected from the worst hard labors, Jefferson’s own progeny are hardly “created equal.” To contrast the comparatively easier lives of Jefferson’s children, Bradley chooses as her third protagonist another (historically documented) plantation child, Peter Fossett, who, unlike Beverly and Maddy can openly love, admire, live with his father, but will be subjected to watching his family splintered and sold.

Intended for younger readers, Bradley navigates admirably through challenging territory, voicing the confusion children must confront in a senseless world they are born into, that they cannot possibly understand. Sally must explain the incomprehensible, conflicting laws that make her children both white (seven of their eight great-grandparents were white – which in itself is a heinous history) and slaves (the child of a slave is also a slave) at the same time. She must prepare at least two of her children for their white destinies by age 18, at the cost of losing each forever … to freedom.

Whether read as history or fiction, Sons is an unflinching look at America’s tragic enslaved past. As African American History Month begins this week, Bradley’s enlightening, fascinating novel is an extremely timely reminder that “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are hard-won “inalienable rights” meant for one and all.

Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2011

Leave a Comment

Filed under ..Adult Readers, ..Middle Grade Readers, ..Young Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, African American

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,

January 4, 2013 · 10:19 am

This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz

This Is How You Lose HerThus far, mega-award winning Junot Díaz (also recently bestowed the “Genius” moniker by the MacArthur Foundation) hasn’t written a book without his sort-of autobiographical stand-in Yunior de las Casas. Díaz’s 1996 fiction debut, Drown, introduced Yunior through interlinked short stories; a decade-plus later, Díaz turned over full narrative control to his pseudo-alter-ego in his 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Yunior stars again in Díaz’s latest award-studded title which, if you choose to stick in your ears, you get the added experience of Díaz’s own narration. Both Drown and Oscar are superbly narrated by Johnathan Davis; here, the switch to Díaz is both disturbing (I know this is fiction, but all that first-person confession seems suddenly heavier) and rewarding (who doesn’t want to hear an author read his/her own writing … uh, except for maybe Michael Ondaatje’s surprisingly disappointing performance of his – also filled with autobiographical overlaps – The Cat’s Table).

Given the title (not to mention the endless fawning media attention), This is not a collection of lovey-dovey happy-endings. Of the nine stories, eight belong to Yunior who has an uncontrollable problem with fidelity. “I’m not a bad guy,” the first story – ”The Sun, the Moon, the Stars” – opens, “I’m like everyone else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good.” His cheated-on girlfriend disagrees: “She considers me a typical Dominican man: a sucio, an a**hole.” Having witnessed his father’s and brother’s wandering ways, Yunior thought he could be otherwise: “You had hoped the gene missed you, skipped a generation, but clearly you were kidding yourself,” he admits in “Miss Lora.” By the final story, “The Cheater’s Guide to Love,” Yunior’s sucio red-letter badge threatens permanence.

Half of Yunior’s eight stories expand his immigrant childhood into searching teenagerhood: the family’s not-so-warm New Jersey reunion with a cold, controlling father in “Invierno”; his brother Rafa’s teenage, testosterone-charged exploits in “Nilda”; Rafa’s leukemia with the neverending complications of his too-active love life in “The Pura Principle”; and Yunior’s own cheating-on-his-high-school-girlfriend extracurricular relationship with an older woman in “Miss Lora.” Yunior’s college and young adult experiences get confessionally aired in “Alma,” “Flaca,” and “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars,” then jumps ahead to Yunior as an almost-middle-aged Harvard professor who, in the novella-length “The Cheater’s Guide to Love,” suffers many wrenching lonely years after his fiancée discovers his staggering, well-documented, on-the-side record and (no surprise) leaves him.

While Yunior commands the spotlight – the majority of the women here are temporary diversions, even the pined-for fiancée – at least two women demand lasting attention: Yunior’s mother who is neglected, oppressed, abandoned, and finally liberated with a Spanglish coven regularly available for prayer and gossip; and Yasmin, the protagonist in the single story that doesn’t belong to Yunior, “Otravida, Otravez,” who is a Dominican immigrant whose lover has a letter-writing wife back in the DR.

Beyond the repetitively bad behavior in every story, Díaz imbues each cheating tale with layered depth, including challenges of immigration and assimilation, absent and abusive parents, isolation, socioeconomic barriers, gender gaps, and racial divides. Indeed, as Yunior proclaims, he’s “not a bad guy”; he’s just a horrible lover, but he can be a caring friend and – thanks to that ex who compiled his exploits into “the Doomsday Book” and mailed it to him with a note, “… for your next book“ – he turns out to be quite the provocative storyteller.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012

3 Comments

Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, .Short Stories, Carribbean American

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , ,

December 26, 2012 · 9:33 am

The Spy Lover by Kiana Davenport

Spy LoverThe Spy Lover lingered on the top of my must-read pile for months, mainly because I just needed a break from the death and destruction of war (seems to be my reading theme for too much of this year!). I wasn’t wrong to be afraid: set during the U.S. Civil War, the horrific, insanity-inducing body count looms large on almost every page, making the haunting, multi-layered love stories that much more precious and lasting. That love – between family, friends, lovers – can outlast the man-made evils of war is stunning testimony to the human capacity to nurture, bond, and survive.

Johnny Tom, who escapes famine and death in his native China, arrives in the new world only to be repeatedly enslaved. From the spirit-breaking labor of the Hawai’i sugar plantations, he escapes to the mainland, only to be kidnapped and shipped to New Orleans where he is offered up on the auction block as a cheaper alternative to black slaves. His brief respite as a free man, contentedly sharing life with his hapa Native American wife and their daughter, is stolen from him when the Civil War breaks out, and the town’s men are conscripted to serve in the Confederate Army. Refusing to fight for slavery, he defects to the Union side, answering promises that his loyalty will be rewarded with citizenship upon victory. He stays alive talking story, managing to turn away from the racist barrages, concentrating on nurturing the weaker and younger with his tales of travel, relationships, and survival when nothing else is left.

In another camp, Johnny’s teenage daughter has escaped her own slaughter, only to witness to thousands and thousands of unthinkable tragedies. Thinking the only way to find her father will be through her own military service, Era Tom is caregiver, comforter, savior … and spy. She tends to the Confederate wounded with genuine empathy and selfless caring, even as she gathers intelligence for the other side. She will not serve the slavers, and yet she will do everything she can to keep their butchered boys alive. When she falls headlong in love with a soldier whose mangled arm she helps to remove then hopes to heal, she must somehow find a way to justify heart, mind, and soul with her traitorous emotions …

Relying on her own ancestral history, bestselling Hawai’i author Kiana Davenport renders a little-known, vital moment of American history and bears testimony to its remarkable Chinese American survivors. When the Civil War finally ended, the U.S. government abandoned Chinese and Chinese American soldiers, revoking their promise of citizenship. Post-Civil War, Chinese Americans fell victim to one of the most virulently racist, anti-Asian periods in American history, marked by murderous purgings of whole communities throughout the American West. Racism became institutionalized, culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which remained legal until 1943, but effectively enforced until 1965 when race-based immigration quotas finally lifted. Not until 2003 – almost 150 years! – were Civil War soldiers of Chinese descent recognized very posthumously with citizenship; the descendants, as Davenport notes, are still denied veteran pensions.

History – often presented via sterilized facts and surreal figures – always becomes more real with names and faces attached. Davenport vividly journeys coast-to-coast with her fearsome ancestors, stopping in some of the most gruesome, blood-soaked battlefields, and to dream and hope in some of the most majestic open frontiers. Their intertwined stories beckon … you merely need to turn the page and listen in.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012

Leave a Comment

Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, Chinese, Chinese American, Hapa, Hawaiian, Native American

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

December 12, 2012 · 9:35 am

The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich

Plague of DovesOnly when Louise Erdrich won this year’s National Book Award for The Round House, did I learn that House is the middle of a planned trilogy that begins with The Plague of Doves which, most serendipitously, was already loaded on my iPod. A bit of real magic, no? [If you, too, should choose the audible route (highly recommended), Plague's four multi-generational narrators are resonatingly voiced by Kathleen McInerney and Peter Francis James.]

Plague, a 2009 Pulitzer finalist (Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge won that year), opens with the brutal murder of almost an entire family (a baby survives), is haunted throughout by the “rough justice,” wrongful round-up and hanging of innocent Indian men who are accused of the crime, and closes with the inevitable oncoming death of a troubled small town. But in between such tragedies and endings are the complicated, vibrant, interwoven lives of Pluto’s Native and non-Native communities, whose members repel and attract, nurture and avoid each other, who love, hate, marry, and betray one another.

Evelina Harp – whose family ancestry reaches back to a direct affiliation with Louis Riel, the legendary political and spiritual leader of the Canadian Métis (Native Americans of mixed indigenous Native/First Nations and European heritage) – is the novel’s most youthful voice, who is plagued throughout by impossible love. When she’s not suffering from impassioned self-absorption, Evelina channels the stories of her near-centenarian grandfather, Mooshum; even as his tall tales often prove unreliable, his venerable age makes him the town’s de facto historical harbinger.

What Evelina doesn’t or can’t share is filled in by Judge Antone Bazil Coutts, Evelina’s uncle-by-marriage, whose distinguished demeanor masks an obsessive dead-end love story gone awry; Marn Wolde, the suffering wife of a magnetic evangelical preacher who was once a paid kidnapper; and Doctor Cordelia Lochren, the area’s first female doctor, who retires in her later years as the first and final president of Pluto’s historical society.

Like proverbial puzzle pieces, a recognizable picture forms by story’s end – more specifically, what emerges most clearly is a gnarly family tree with branches both brutally pruned and surprisingly intertwined. That said, not every question gets thoroughly answered … with two-thirds of her trilogy to come, Erdrich still has a lot of explaining to do for her very, very lucky readers. Stay tuned …

Readers: Adult

Published: 2008

11 Comments

Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, Native American

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

November 30, 2012 · 10:56 am

Escape to Gold Mountain: A Graphic History of the Chinese in North America by David H.T. Wong

Canadian eco-architect David H.T. Wong‘s debut defies simple categorization: while clearly a graphic work for younger readers (much of the language is soooo totally tweenage vernacular), Escape covers some 200 years of history through the fictional story of a Chinese Canadian American family, also named Wong, whose experiences are based “on my own family’s experiences, and was inspired by the many elders and friends I’ve been fortunate to meet along my own journey of discovery,” Wong explains in his “Preface.” And because “racism knows no boundaries,” Wong weaves together the histories of both sides of the northern border: “The early Chinese did not differentiate between Canada and the United States. … The new continent was one: It was Gam Saan [Gold Mountain], the strange new land.”

At the suggestion of Grandma Wong, three teenagers head to the Museum of Migration in Vancouver, home of the “Iron Chink,” an early 1900s canning machine that replaced hundreds of mostly Chinese workers. Billy, the visibly non-Asian friend, reacts to the disturbing name with laughter while making slanty eyes with his fingers (some friend, huh?). After being duly chastised, the kids get a sobering history lesson from a tearful Grandma: “The Iron Chink … it represents a people’s pain and sadness. All we wanted was work. But we were Chinese … they said we were not like them. We were called all sorts of names … and Chinese people in this country were killed – only because they were ‘different.’”

The Wong family history, which began in the Americas 150 years ago, bears witness to the abusive conditions of building the most difficult sections of the U.S. Transcontinental Railroad, then completing the western section of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the deadly competition during the Gold Rush, and the often murderous purgings from one community after another. With rigid anti-immigration laws in both the U.S. and Canada, the first American Wong’s only opportunity for a family is a result of happenstance, when he adopts a young man also named Wong, who has just lost his brother to brutal overwork. The generations criss-cross the shared border, seeking refuge and work wherever they can find either (rarely both), losing loved ones, fighting wars, and proving their loyalties. Race-based immigration laws finally change (1965 in the U.S., 1967 in Canada), and even more decades pass before official apologies are rendered for the institutionalized racism of Canada’s Head Tax and Exclusion Laws in 2006, and the Resolution of Regret over the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 passes in 2011 (U.S. Senate) and 2012 (U.S. House of Representatives).

Wong proves that pictures can indeed hold thousands (and thousands!) of words, capturing 200+ years of history in as many pages; he also includes a “Chinglish” glossary, a timeline that overlaps China and Gam Saan, maps, extensive notes, and a thorough bibliography. In his “Afterword,” he distinguishes his fictions from facts, including his penultimate chapter, “Old Foes, New Relations,” which he based on the life of WWII veteran Frank Wong whose daughter married a Canadian “whose father served for the Nazi regime”!

Beyond the print, Wong reveals in the book’s blog how his original title of The Iron Chink got nixed because of a (then-) Knicks incident – the now-infamous ‘Chink in the Armor’-Linsanity media blow-up. How soberingly ironic that even after centuries, that single word continues to cause such angry, hurtful controversy.

Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult

Published: 2012

Leave a Comment

Filed under ..Middle Grade Readers, ..Young Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Graphic Novel/Manga/Manwha, .Nonfiction, Canadian Asian Pacific American, Chinese, Chinese American

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,