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1948226391
| 9781948226394
| B0BT91B76L
| 3.62
| 202
| unknown
| Oct 17, 2023
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it was amazing
| What makes a person the same person over time? Is it our consciousness, the what-it’s-like to be us? Is consciousness like a light that’s either on What makes a person the same person over time? Is it our consciousness, the what-it’s-like to be us? Is consciousness like a light that’s either on or off?-------------------------------------- What remains of a person once they’ve died? It depends on what we choose to keep.Amy Kurzweil is a long-time cartoonist for The New Yorker. If the name sounds a bit familiar, but you aren’t a reader of that magazine, it may be because her father is Ray Kurzweil. He is a genius of wide renown. He invented a way for computers to process text in almost any font, a major advance in making optical character recognition (OCR) a useful, and ubiquitous tool. He also developed early electronic instruments. As a teenager he wrote software that wrote music in the style of classical greats. No gray cells left behind there. He happened to be very interested in Artificial Intelligence (AI). It helps to have a specific project in mind when trying to develop new applications and ideas. Ray had one. His father, Fred, had died when he was a young man. Ray wanted to make an AI father, a Fred ChatBot, or Fredbot, to regain at least some of the time he had never had with his dad. [image] Amy Kurzweil - Image from NPR - shot by Melissa Leshnov Fred was a concert pianist and conductor in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s. A wealthy American woman was so impressed with him that she told him that if he ever wanted to come to the USA, she would help. The Nazification of Austria made the need to leave urgent in 1938, so Fred fled with his wife, Hannah. (He had actually been Fritz in Austria, becoming Fred in the states.) He eventually found work, teaching music. Artificial: A Love Story is a physically hefty art book, a tale told in drawings and text. Amy traces in pictures her father’s effort to reconstruct as much of his father’s patterns as possible. To aid in the effort there was a storage facility with vast amounts of material from his life both in Austria and in America. She joins into the enterprise of transcribing much of the handwritten material, then reading it into recordings which are used to teach/train the AI software. It is a years-long process, which is fascinating in its own right. She also draws copies of many of the documents she finds for use in the book. [image] Ray Kurzweil with a portrait of his father - image from The NPR interview - Shot by Melisssa Leshnov But there is much more going on in this book than interesting, personalized tech. First, there is the element of historical preservation. I always understood my father’s desire to resurrect his father’s identity as being connected to two different kinds of trauma. One is the loss of his father at a young age in a common but tragic scenario, with heart disease. The other trauma is this loss of a whole culture. Jewish life in Vienna was incredibly vibrant. Literally overnight it was lost. The suddenness of that loss was profound, and it took me a while to appreciate that. My great-aunt Dorit, who died this past year at 98, said they were following all the arbitrary protocols of the Nazis to save all this documentation. Saving documentation is an inheritance in my family that is a response to that traumatic circumstance. - from the PW interviewKurzweil looks at three generations of creativity, (Fritz was a top-tier musician. His wife, Hannah, was an artist. Ray was also a musician, but mostly a tech genius. Amy is a cartoonist and a writer.) using Ray’s Fredbot project as the central pillar around which to organize an ongoing discussion of concepts. In doing so, she offers up not merely the work of the project, but her personal experiences, showing clear commonalities between herself and her never-met grandfather. This makes for a very satisfying read. Are the similarities across generations, this stream of creativity, the impact not just of DNA, but of lived experience? Nature or nurture, maybe the realization of potential brought to flower by the influence of environment whether external (living in a place that values what one has to offer) or internal (families nurturing favored traits)? [image] Image from the book - posted on The American Academy in Berlin site One could ask, “what makes us what are?” The book opens with a conversation about the meaning of life. But life is surely less determinative, less hard-edge defined than that. A better question might be what were the historical factors and personal choices that contributed to the evolution of who we have become? [image] Image from the book - it was posted in the NPR interview Existential questions abound, which makes this a brain-candy read of the first order. Kurzweil looks at issues around AI consciousness. Can artificial consciousness approach humanity without a body? What if we give an AI a body, with sensations? Ray thinks that we are mostly comprised of patterns. What if those patterns could be preserved, maybe popped into a new carrier. It definitely gets us into Battlestar Galactica territory. How would people be any different from Cylons then? Is there really a difference? Would that signal eternal life? Would we be gods to our creations? If we make an AI consciousness will it be to know, love, and serve us? The rest of that catechistic dictat adds that it is also to be happy with him in heaven forever. I am not so certain we want our AIs remaining with us throughout eternity. As with beloved pets, sometimes we need a break. Are we robots for God? Ray thinks such endless replication is possible, BTW. Kurzweil uses the image of Pinocchio throughout to illustrate questions of personhood, with wanting to live, then wanting to live forever. [image] Every Battlestar Cylon model explained - image from ScreenRant Persistence of self is a thread here. As noted in the introductory quotes, Kurzweil thinks about whether a person is the same person before and after going through some change. How much change is needed before it crosses some line? Am I the same person I was before I read this book? My skin and bones are older. But they are the same skin and bones. However, I have new thoughts in my head. Does having different thoughts change who I fundamentally am? Where does learning leave off and transition take over? Where does that self go when we die? Can it be reconstructed, if only as a simulacrum? How about experiences? Once experienced, where do those experiences go? These sorts of mental gymnastics are certainly not everyone’s cuppa, but I found this element extremely stimulating. Kurzweil remains grounded in her personal experience, feelings, and concerns. The book has intellectual and philosophical heft, and concerns itself with far-end technological concerns, but it remains, at heart, a very human story. As one might expect from an established cartoon artist who has generated more smiles than the Joker’s makeup artist, there are plenty of moments of levity here. Artificial is not a yuck-fest, but a serious story with some comic relief. It is a book that will make you laugh, smile, and feel for the people depicted in its pages. Amy Kurzweil has written a powerful, smart, thought-provoking family tale. There is nothing artificial about that. I used to wonder if I could wake up into a different self. For all I knew, it could have happened every morning. A new self would have a new set of memories.Review posted - 01/12/23 Publication date – 10/17/23 I received a hard copy of Artificial: A Love Story from Catapult in return for a fair review. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review is cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages Profile – from Catapult AMY KURZWEIL is a New Yorker cartoonist and the author of Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir. She was a 2021 Berlin Prize Fellow with the American Academy in Berlin, a 2019 Shearing Fellow with the Black Mountain Institute, and has received fellowships from MacDowell, Djerassi, and elsewhere.Interviews -----NPR - Using AI, cartoonist Amy Kurzweil connects with deceased grandfather in 'Artificial' by Chloe Veltman -----Publishers Weekly - Reincarnation: PW Talks with Amy Kurzweil by Cheryl Klein -----PC Magazine - How Ray Kurzweil and His Daughter Brought A Relative Back From The Dead By Emily Dreibelbis ——LitHub - Amy Kurzweil on the Open Questions of the Future by Christopher Hermelin Songs/Music -----The Jefferson Airplane - White Rabbit- referenced in Chapter 6 Items of Interest from the author -----Artificial: A Love Story promo vid -----The New Yorker - excerpt -----New Yorker - A List of Amy Kurzweil’s pieces for the magazine Items of Interest -----Ray Kurzweil on I’ve got a Secret -----A trailer for Transcendant Man, a documentary about Ray Kurzweil -----WeBlogTheWorld - Amy interviews Ray in a Fireside Chat at NASA – sound is poor. You will need to ramp up the volume to hear – video – 23:07 -----Wiki on Battlestar Galactica ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Jan 08, 2024
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Jan 11, 2024
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Hardcover
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1646220722
| 9781646220724
| 1646220722
| 3.47
| 619
| Mar 07, 2023
| Mar 07, 2023
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it was amazing
| ”Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” - Chico Marx in Duck Soup-------------------------------------- The truth isn’t enough. Most people are ”Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” - Chico Marx in Duck Soup-------------------------------------- The truth isn’t enough. Most people aren’t even listening for it.Agent Mulder knew that the truth was out there. But what can one do about those who are incapable or unwilling to see it, or worse, those who have a vested interest in disbelief? And how much responsibility to persuade the unpersuadable must be carried by those whose truth is in question? Aliens do figure large in this book, but not in the Mulder/Scully mode. [image] Dina Nayeri - image from LitHub Dina Nayeri has been writing about the truth since at least 2012, with a particular emphasis on immigrant issues, more specifically, on refugees, asylum seekers. Her previous book, The Waiting Place, released in 2022, documented life in Katsikas, a Greek refugee camp, mixing tales from the lives of some of the children there with her own experiences as a refugee from Iran. In The Ungrateful Refugee, 2019, she writes of adult refugees she has met, looking at what being a refugee is like for them. She has also written novels and short fiction, centered on the refugee experience. And that is her primary focus here as well. The aim of that book [The Ungrateful Refugee] was to really look back on my own experience, and what people go through now to make some sense of the modern displacement experience. One of the sections of the book is about asylum storytelling, and I had so many stories of people getting disbelieved for the stupidest reasons, and the way that the asylum officers listen to the stories. It was very shocking. I wanted to write a lot more about that and, with this book, I wanted to expand that out to just how the vulnerable are listened to, versus people who are very privileged. - from the Ms Magazine interviewIn Who Gets Believed, Nayeri takes on a broader perspective. She looks at the challenges people face in trying to get their truths believed not only in refugee situations but in many other walks of life. There are two factual threads that bind the book together, weaving in and out over the course of three hundred or so pages. First is the tale of K, a Tamil torture victim whose evidence includes a back full of scars. Somehow the system tries to persuade itself that K did that to himself in order to gain entry to the UK. If this sounds Kafkaesque to you, it does to Nayeri, as well. She frequently cites that patron saint of bureaucratic horror as she takes us through the nightmare world of mindlessness, and barely disguised racism, sexism, and xenophobia that is the West’s immigration system. It makes a powerful metaphor for how the system treats those whose rights are supposedly guaranteed by international treaty, but who are more typically treated as rightless, and suspect supplicants. For most migrants [asylum attorney Maleha Haq] explained, credibility isn’t the reason for rejection. In fact, the issue of credibility is cleverly avoided by using the claimant’s own lack of knowledge about the definition of a word. What is a refugee? Before he is believed, an asylum seeker must choose the right story out of many, the relevant part of a complicated life. It’s like being asked to cut a circular disk from a cylinder. You have many stacked circles, but if you cut at the wrong angle, you have an oval. You’ve failed to present the desired thing.Another thread is her brother-in-law, someone with a lifetime of mental health issues. Making the credibility tale personal, she writes about not believing he was really incapable of providing for himself in the world, seeing him as a leech on his family, a con-artist working the system. This is a powerful approach, bringing in real-world issues, but with names and faces, and humanizing the core questions even more by weaving in how disbelief, even her own, has impacted her life. One of the many strengths of the book is Nayeri’s commentary on communication. She tells how language is used as a tool of obfuscation and exclusion. Refugees must learn the nuances of the immigration system in order to gain entrance. They must learn to play the game, memorize the exact right words to use, be ready to offer the right presentation. The unpolished truth is typically fraught with openings that officials, whose default is rejection, (UK Home Office workers are given target numbers for rejecting asylum seekers.) can seize on to deny asylum. It is disheartening to learn that the prospects of a refugee gaining asylum correspond very closely with whether they have legal counsel or not, which bodes ill for most. Again Nayeri offers a personal element, reporting on her experiences with having to learn not just what, but how to present, in order to get what she wanted, whether acceptance to a college of her choice, or a job, post college. Despite all the talk of leadership and change-making, what you actually learn at Harvard Business School is how to be believed—how to be the ones people want to believe, feel safe believing, given their heuristic shortcuts.The cost to refugees is clearly higher but the parallels in how one must approach large systems with language resonates like Big Ben at the top of the hour. …belonging is a performance with a scriptNayeri looks as well at a bit of the world of medicine. She notes that many caregivers disparage sufferers of Sickle Cell Disease, who must repeatedly seek help with pain issues, as “Sicklers,” refusing to take seriously the very real pain experienced by those afflicted. And she notes caregiver disparagement of different ways of grieving in different cultures. She has a tale of her own about her doctors refusing to treat her the way she wanted, as a reflection of how many doctors do not take seriously the wishes and pain reports of many women patients. This one resonated personally. In late 2021, my own sister experienced this, as, for months, she had complained of pain, but was sent home from each medical visit (when she could even get one. Sometimes this entailed months of waiting.) with little or no relief, and no real examination, certainly no effective one, of underlying causation. After all, she was just an old lady, and old people have pain all the time. No big whoop. The pain finally became too much and she was rushed to the ER. Subsequent surgery revealed a return of a stomach cancer after a ten-year-remission, nicely metastasized. She was dead within weeks. The risk entailed in medical professionals ignoring claims of pain is very real. She takes on The Reid Technique, a widely used interrogation regimen routinely abused by police, with a chargeable outcome being a much higher priority than truth-seeking. She looks at how the methodology is used to generate inconsistencies, which are then portrayed as evidence of dishonesty. The obverse of this is firefighters being granted exceptional credibility when testifying as expert witnesses, despite there sometimes being little scientific merit to what is claimed on the stand. The Reid Technique begins with an assumption of guilt. It was originally intended to be used only when the interrogator is absolutely certain of guilt. Even then, it was intended not to extract a confession that might condemn the suspect on its own (the technique is, after all, so torturous that even its creators didn’t believe it would cause an innocent person to confess, they seemed aware of that risk), but to uncover new, unknown details—intimate ones about the why and the how—that could then be corroborated. It was that supporting physical evidence that would convict the guilty—a body, a weapon, some real proof.It might be easy to intone a general rule of Trust No One, but refugees do not have that luxury. Unless an asylum-seeker can somehow get legal representation, they are forced to trust people who are in a position to help or harm their cases. There is plenty more in here, dives on how we persuade ourselves to believe thing that are not true, how politics creates truths, even alters our bodies, on how we only see what we are looking for, how having stories told publicly makes them more real, how consultants befuddle their clients. You will learn a lot. You will also feel a lot. Nayeri’s stories are moving, upsetting, and hopefully, motivating. They will force you to think, and, hopefully, engage in some introspection. Her willingness to own her own biases shows that she is not looking for justice solely in the world outside, but within herself. Red Smith famously said that writing was easy, All you do is sit down at a typewriter, cut open a vein, and bleed. I imagine there was a lot of cleaning up necessary in Nayeri’s writing places while she worked on this book. Also, she is not trying to get you to like her. This is an honest portrayal of a complicated person, one who struggled trying to fit in with American society as a child, and who maneuvered the ivy halls of Harvard and Princeton, and a premier spot in the consultoverse, in her drive for success. Who Gets Believed is a powerful look not just at the terrifying refugee experience, but at the wider problems of disbelief that are grounded in biased or unsupported notions. I Want To Believe that the issues raised in this book are being addressed, but while I expect that there are awareness programs being run by some healthcare provider institutions, I seriously doubt there is anything being done by police departments to cope with abuse of the Reid Technique. And I would bet that immigration services, swamped as they are with applicants, and chronically understaffed, are unlikely to have done much about basing asylum denials on firmer reasons than what appears the case today. The truth of what is happening in these parts of our world is definitely out there. Dina Nayeri has brought some of that truth to the rest of us. Belief is only needed if there is no proof. Nayeri offers evidence. These are truths you need to know. this variability in judicial standards is one of the greatest flaws of the American asylum system. Why should the weight of any kind of evidence vary by judge? Should one’s fate depend on the compassion or politics of the judge assigned? Should it vary by administration?...asylum grant rates go up and down based on who the attorney general is. That’s not just at the judge level but at the screening stage. The number of people found to have credible fear and entitled to be seen by a judge depends on political pressure. Review posted - 06/02/23 Publication dates ----------Hardcover – 03/07/23 ----------Trade paperback - 03/5/24 I received a copy of Who Gets Believed? from Catapult in return for a fair review. [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] This review is cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Profile - from Wikipedia Nayeri was born in Isfahan, Iran. Her mother was a doctor and her father a dentist. She spent the first 8 years of her life in Isfahan but fled Iran with her mother and brother Daniel in 1988 because her mother had converted to Christianity and the moral police of the Islamic Republic had threatened her with execution.[1]Nayeri, her mother and brother spent two years in Dubai and Rome as asylum seekers and eventually settled in Oklahoma, in the United States.[2] Her father remained in Iran, where he still lives. She has written several works of non-fiction, novels for adult and children, and numerous articles. Links to the Nayeri’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages Interviews -----NPR - Dina Nayeri wants you to question 'Who Gets Believed' | Book of the Day - with Juana summers – audio - 8:44 -----Ms Magazine - Telling the ‘Right’ Story: Dina Nayeri on Refugee Credibility - by Jera Brown -----LitHub - Manufacturing Lies: DinaNayeri on How Our Cultural and Bureaucratic Norms Often Betray the Truth with Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan Songs/Music -----Weeknd - High for This- mentioned in Chapter 5 Items of Interest from the author -----PBS - Is the distinction between migrant and refugee meaningful? - Video – 3:02 -----Muck Rack - Articles by Dina Nayeri - links to pieces in diverse publications Items of Interest -----NY Times - Many Women Have an Intense Fear of Childbirth, Survey Suggests by Roni Caryn Rabin -----AP - Why do so many Black women die in pregnancy? One reason: Doctors don't take them seriously by Kat Stafford -----Wisconsin Criminal Defense - Understanding the Reid Technique in Police Interrogations - The Law Offices of Christopher J. Cherella -----Project Gutenberg - The Trial by Franz Kafka – full text for free ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 08, 2023
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May 22, 2023
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May 23, 2023
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Hardcover
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1640095209
| 9781640095205
| 1640095209
| 4.15
| 95
| Jul 05, 2022
| Jul 05, 2022
|
really liked it
| In…Almeida-Sanchez v. United States in 1973, Justice Thurgood Marshall, an icon of the civil rights movement and the first Black man to serve on th In…Almeida-Sanchez v. United States in 1973, Justice Thurgood Marshall, an icon of the civil rights movement and the first Black man to serve on the Supreme Court, asked a series of questions that pressed the government’s lawyers about the true extent of the Border Patrol’s authority on American highways deep inside the United States. Unsatisfied with the response, Marshall finally asked if the Border Patrol could legally stop and search the vehicle of the president of the United States without any evidence or suspicion whatsoever. When the lawyer said “Yes,” Marshall concluded, “Nobody is protected.”-------------------------------------- The Border Patrol in their green uniforms, patrols between crossing points. Customs was renamed the Office of Field Operations, its agents, in blue uniforms, work at crossing points and in airports. Agents of a third unit of CBP, Air and Marine Operations (AMO), wear brown uniforms and manage the agency’s aircraft and ships. AMO’s authorization in the U.S. code differs from the Border Patrol in that it does not include any geographical limits, so they are able to operate anywhere in the country.So a few military-looking sorts in camo, with automatic weapons, rush up to you, grab you by both arms and stuff you into an unmarked van that speeds away. Only a general “Police” insignia on their uniforms, wearing shades at night, covering their faces, no explanation of why you are being abducted. Where are you? Russia? Turkey? The West Bank? How about Portland, Oregon, July 2020? What the hell was the Border Patrol doing in Portland anyway, at a demonstration protesting the police murder of George Floyd, an event having zero to do with immigration? In Nobody is Protected, Reece Jones explains how it has come to be that an agency created to protect the border, and to deal with immigration issues has seen its domain grow to the point where it can operate in most of the country, and take on missions having absolutely nothing to do with crossing a border. What makes them particularly dangerous is that they do not live by the laws that govern the rest of the police forces in the nation. Do they need probable cause to stop your vehicle? Not really. How about a warrant? A BP agent laughs. Can they use racial profiling for selecting who to stop? Of course. That a problem? Oh, and they are now, taken together in their three parts, adding in ICE, the largest police force in the nation. Sleep tight. [image] Reece Jones - image from Counterpoint – photo by Silvay Jones Jones looks at the history of border patrol efforts prior to the establishment of BP in 1924. He tracks the changes in the characteristics of the BP over time, while noting some of the traits that have not changed at all. The Texas Rangers of the early 20th century figure large in this, complete with reports of Ranger atrocities and their considerable representation in the Border Patrol once it was set up. As Mexico outlawed slavery long before the USA, one of the things the Rangers did was intercept American slaves trying to flee the country. The mentality persisted into the BP force, along with those Rangers. Jones offers reminders that the charge of the patrol was often racist, reflecting national legislation that sought to exclude non-white immigrants, with particular focus on Mexicans and Chinese. Exceptions were made, of course, to accommodate Texan farmers during the seasons when labor was needed. A guest worker program was established to compensate for many American men being away during World War II. Willard Kelly, the Border Patrol chief at the time, told a Presidential Commission in 1950 that “Service officers were instructed to defer apprehensions of Mexicans employed on Texas farms where to remove them would likely result in the loss of crops.” Instead, they would focus on the period after the harvest in order to send the workers back to Mexico. Similarly, during economic downturns, the Border Patrol would step up enforcement to ensure the state did not have to provide for the unemployed laborers. These roundups would often happen just before payday, so agribusinesses got the labor and the agents got their apprehension quotas, but the Mexican workers were not paid.Outside the illuminating history of the force itself, much of what Jones offers here is a delineation of the laws that define where BP responsibilities and limitations lie, looking particularly closely at several Supreme Court decisions. We have all heard of Roe v Wade and Brown v the Board of Ed, cases decided (some later undecided) by the Supreme Court (SCOTUS), that were major legal landmarks. Roe established a right of privacy that made abortion legal across the nation. Brown established that separate-but-equal was not a justification for continuing segregation in public schools. There are many such landmark cases. In Nobody is Protected, Reece Jones looks at the rulings that have allowed the Border Patrol to become a dangerous federal police force, subject to far fewer limitations than any other police force in the nation. These cases, while not household names like Roe and Brown, are of considerable importance for the civil rights of all of us, not just immigrants. In Almeida-Sanchez v. United States in 1973, SCOTUS allowed the BP to search a vehicle without any justification. In its 1975 decision in The United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, SCOTUS was ok with agents using racial profiling for selecting vehicles to stop. In 1976, SCOTUS held in The United States v. Martinez-Fuerte that BP could establish checkpoints in the interior of the USA and detain anyone to ask about their immigration status. So you live nowhere near the border, right? Shouldn’t impact you. But hold on a second. By administrative fiat, BP was granted a one hundred mile border zone. And not just from the expected Mexican and Canadian borders, but from the edge of the land of the USA. So, this means that two thirds of the population of the United States falls within BP’s rights-light border zone. Fourth Amendment? What fourth amendment? Jones reports on a crusader named Terry Bressi, an astronomer who has been stopped 574 times (as of the writing of the book) while driving to work at an interior checkpoint. He got fed up and started videotaping all his interactions with checkpoint law enforcement, for posting on line. They did not like that. They hated even more that he knew his rights and stood up to bullying by local cops who had been assigned to the checkpoint. You will learn a lot here. About a policy of Prevention through Deterrence that channeled thousands of would be immigrants and asylum seekers away from normal points of entry, toward perilous crossings. And if they should not survive the effort? Sorry, not our problem. And they try to interfere with people who simply want to save the lives of those coming into our country at risk of their own lives. In addition to failing to properly search for missing people in the border zone, the Border Patrol also actively disrupts efforts by humanitarian agencies. Beyond the destruction of water drops and aid stations, they often refuse to provide location information to other rescuers, deny access to interview people in Border Patrol custody who were with the missing person, and harass search teams in the border zone.You will learn of agency mission creep, from border control to drug enforcement to testing for radiation in vehicles (which catches a lot of cancer patients, but so far no dirty bomb terrorists) to actions that are blatantly political in nature and patently illegal. I expect you will not be shocked to learn that abuse by BP personnel goes largely unpunished. No action against the agent was taken in over 95% of cases of reported abuse. When the Inspector General for the agency tried to investigate the 25% of BP deaths-in-custody that were deemed suspicious, he was stopped (this last bit is from the This Is Hell interview, not the book). The BP manifests a Wild West mentality that is not much changed from when it was staffed with slave hunters and disgruntled confederates. One thing that has changed is the increasing politicization of immigration by fear-mongering Republican demagogues, and the increased concern over national security brought about by 9/11. There are vastly more agents on the force today. In the 1970s, for example, there were only about fifteen hundred BP agents. Today, just in the BP wing of Customs and Border Patrol (CPB) there are almost twenty thousand. The Field Operations branch adds another twenty thousand, and the Air and Marine Operations branch tops that off with another eighteen hundred. Another twenty thou in ICE, and it gets even larger. Jones may not be entirely correct when he says that the Border Patrol, per se, is the largest police force in the USA, but when these four connected wings are considered as one, ok, yeah, it is. Jones offers some do-able solutions in addition to proposing legislative changes that might rein in this growing giant, and increasing threat to the rights of all Americans. It is usual for books on policy to toss out solutions that have zero chance of seeing the light of day. So, sensibility here is most welcome. I have two gripes with the book. There needed to be considerable attention paid to the SCOTUS decisions that have allowed the BP to expand its legal domain. But Jones dug a bit too deep at times, incorporating intel that slowed the overall narrative without adding a lot. In fact, a better title for this might have been The Gateway to Absolute Police Power: SCOTUS and the Border Patrol. Second is that there is no index. Maybe not a big deal if one is reading an EPUB and can search at will, but in a dead-trees-and-ink book, it is a decided flaw. Bottom line is that Reece Jones has done us all a service in reporting on how a federal police agency has grown way larger than it needs to be, has accumulated more power than it requirea to do its job, and has used that power to feed itself, to the detriment of the nation. He points out in the interview that border security has become an “industrial-complex” much like its military cousin, albeit on a smaller scale, with diverse public and private vested interests fighting to sustain and expand the agency, regardless of the value returned on investment. It is a dark portrait, but hopefully, by Jones shining some light on it, changes might be prompted that can rein in the beast before it devours what rights we have left. Despite the transformation of the border in the public imagination, the people arriving there are largely the same as they always were. The majority are still migrant farm and factory workers from Mexico. In the past few years, they have been joined by entire families fleeing violence in Central America. These families with small children, who turn themselves in to the Border Patrol as soon as they step foot in the United States, in order to apply for asylum, pose no threat and deserve humane treatment. However, that is not what they have received. As journalist Garrett Graf memorably put it, “CBP went out and recruited Rambo, when it turned out the agency needed Mother Teresa.”Review first posted – 7/29/22 Publication dates ----------Hardcover - 7/5/22 ----------Trade paperback - 7/11/23 I received a hardcover of Nobody is Protected from Counterpoint in return for a fair review. Thanks, KQM. [image] [image] [image] [image] This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi! =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the Reece Jones’s personal and Twitter pages Profile - from Counterpoint REECE JONES is a Guggenheim Fellow. He is a professor and the chair of the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Hawai’i. He is the author of three books, the award-winning Border Walls and Violent Borders, as well as White Borders. He is the editor in chief of the journal Geopolitics and he lives in Honolulu with his family. Interview -----This is Hell - Nobody is Protected / Reece Jones - audio – 52:10 - by Chuck Mertz – this is outstanding! Items of Interest -----Borderless - excerpt -----The Intercept – 7/12/19 - BORDER PATROL CHIEF CARLA PROVOST WAS A MEMBER OF SECRET FACEBOOK GROUP by Ryan Deveaux -----No More Deaths - an NGO doing humanitarian work at the border -----Holding Border Patrol Accountable: Terry Bressi on Recording his 300+ Checkpoint interactions (probably over 600 by now) -----My review of The Line Becomes a River, a wonderful memoir by a former BP agent -----Washington Post - September 18, 2022 - How to prevent customs agents from copying your phone’s content by Tatum Hunter ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jul 06, 2022
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Jul 19, 2022
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Jul 27, 2022
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Hardcover
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1982129395
| 9781982129392
| 1982129395
| 3.88
| 2,488
| May 11, 2021
| May 11, 2021
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it was amazing
| Junie rested her hiccuping head against Grandpa’s bony back as he pedaled on the bumpy road, wobbling and clanking. Across the thin fabric of his s Junie rested her hiccuping head against Grandpa’s bony back as he pedaled on the bumpy road, wobbling and clanking. Across the thin fabric of his sweat-soaked shirt and against Junie’s cheek, his ribs rose and fell with his breathing. She recognized that moment as the beginning and the end of something—though she was too young to say exactly what that something was. But she knew, without really knowing she did, that the gossamer threads we put out into the world turned into filaments, and filaments into tendrils, and that what people called destiny was really the outward contours of billions of these tendrils, as they exerted their tug on each of us.Swimming Back to Trout River is a story of connection and separation, of love and loss, of yearning and disappointment, of growing, striving, succeeding and failing. It is a story of enduring the worst of times, surviving an unquiet heart and a world in upheaval. We follow several characters as they cope with lives severely impacted by their experiences coming of age in China during the Cultural Revolution, a traumatic period that left as many as twenty million dead, and ruined millions more lives and careers. [image] Linda Rui Feng - image from her site Dawn was introduced to music early, when her grandfather received a piano from a Russian conductor, (a long-term loan) before Sino-Soviet relations soured. She wanted to be of use in the world, but her heart sought a different form of creativity. Her most vivid childhood memories were about music, and although they commanded attention, in the end they led nowhere. She remembered crouching on the floor under the piano as her grandfather played it above her. She was five, it was the year before her parents died…In her mind, she wasn’t just under the piano; it was more like she was wearing it as a cloak. Its vibrations enveloped her, echoed in her chest, and emanated down to her toes, claiming her, and she hugged her knees tight just to keep herself in place.There are further steps forward in her musical journey but when she is accepted to university, it is her intention to be an architect, do something practical, build things for the country. However, a chance to be in a school orchestra rekindles her musical flame. It is while she is at university that she becomes friends with Momo. He is smitten with her and is more than happy to have her teach him how to play the violin. But he is practical, an engineering student, seeing the world through the lens of math and physics. While they do not fully connect, there is a connection, a seed planted, and despite his eagerness to be a good party man, Momo continues to feel the need for music in him. Of course, the Red Guard was not happy with people having a love of music outside the sanctioned state product, at a time when enjoying any other music was considered very un-woke, and did their best to destroy alternate perspectives. After college, Momo is working as an engineer at a factory in northeast China when he meets Cassia, who is working as a dental assistant. A year later they are married. It is not long before they have a child, Junie, an otherwise healthy girl who is born with truncated lower limbs. We follow Momo from tales of his childhood in the 1940s and 50s, through university, from his fealty to the Party Line and belief in science to the exclusion of all else into a broader view of the world. We see his interest in music from his introduction by Dawn to his fanboy appreciation of a young virtuoso, long after and far away. We watch his affections, from his connection to Dawn through his love of Cassia to his love for his daughter, and growth as a parent. The story takes us into the mid-1980s, when Junie will turn twelve. We only get to see Junie as a child, being raised by her grandparents, not an unusual situation in 1980s China, managing her physical challenge, a curious, bright girl. It is one of the few disappointments of the book that we do not get more time with her, as she appears primarily at the beginning and a bit near the end of the story. She is a vibrant presence who deserved more pages. It is she who offers the most direct consideration of our attachment to place. Junie scooted over toward him on her knees, reached into the well-worn tub where his feet were planted, and poked at the gnarled sinews and bones in them.She also offers motivation for Momo, trying to weave his family back together again, and is a source of considerable emotional conflict for Cassia. In a way, it is the ties to Junie, direct or otherwise, that impel the other main characters to want to swim back to Trout River. Both of Junie’s parents pursue opportunities in the United States, Cassia working in San Francisco, Momo pursuing a doctorate somewhere in the middle of the country. Momo writes home to tell Junie that he plans for them to all be together for her 12th birthday, in a year and half. But he does not tell her that he and Cassia have become estranged. So, a high bar. In addition to the moving stories of the main characters, there is much thematic content in this book. Feng offers a notion of connectivity that morphs into something larger. The filaments, the tendrils of the passage quoted at the top of this review form a mat of destiny. There are plenty more, some a bit dark: …because of what happened to her the previous year in Beijing, Cassia understood that what set human events in motion were the most ethereal of tendrils, a kind of machinery no less powerful for its lack of discernible shape.There is much on water as well, serving diverse needs, including as a connecting, unifying medium. “I don’t want to go anywhere,” she mumbled between spasms of breath. “I want to stay here with you and Grandma, even when you are old, forever and ever—”Cassia reacts to the Bay area climate as a source of comfort, maybe a way to stay hidden. To Cassia the fog had an inviting, tactile quality. Being in its midst must be like being embraced by the most benign form of water, because you could be immersed in it without drowning.In the Pen America interview Feng says: Though I didn’t always grow up near bodies of water, in my writing I find myself drawn to rivers and coasts, probably because they gesture toward circulation and connectivity, and yet also have unique moods when observed on the time scale of days, years, decades, and even centuries.In an interview with LitHub, asked to summarize her book, Feng replied, How to improvise a life. The fluidity of where we call home. The resilience of the imagination. How the titanic forces of history precipitate in smaller, more recessive lives. She offers a vibrant look at what it means to be a Chinese immigrant in the USA, whether in an above-board visa-holding status, or as a defector, a student, or a menial laborer. What I hope to show with characters like Momo is that the experience of emigration, however hopeful, involves a kind of sundering, a giving up of people and things that otherwise sustain them. And because much of what they give up—the fabric of an extended family, rootedness to a place, an honest narrative of one’s own past—are wholly invisible, they often find it hard to articulate the shapes of these more wayward forms of grief. - from the Pen America interviewGripes are few for this one. More screen time for Junie is the largest. There is a twist near the end that I thought was unnecessary. Those who have read the book will know what I am referring to. This is a beautiful, lyrical novel. There is a richness of language here that will reward patient, gently-paced reading. It will surprise no one, given the artistry of language and the power of imagery in the novel, that Linda Rui Feng is, in addition to being a novelist, a published poet. She is a writer of short fiction as well. A cultural historian, teaching undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Toronto, she offers a look at personal ways in which the Cultural Revolution impacts her characters. In Swimming Back to Trout River, Feng has given us characters who have been shaped by the tumultuous era in which they came of age. They struggle with issues of love, of career, of terrible loss, grief, and of a desire for roots while being uprooted. Their stories are moving, and the trials to which some of them have been subjected are enraging. Thankfully, you will not have to paddle upstream to give this one a look. Swimming Back to Trout River is a dip worth taking. …this morning, while driving the last stretch of road with a storm gathering, I thought: Is it possible that grief too is like music? Maybe once grief begins, you cannot simply cut it off. Rather you have to let it run its course the way an aria comes to its last note. You cannot stop grief in its tracks any more than you can cut off the aria at just any point you deem convenient. Review first posted – May 14, 2021 Publication dates ----------Hardcover – May 11, 2021 ----------Trade paperback - May 17, 2022 I received an e-galley from Simon & Schuster via NetGalley in return for an honest review. =============================EXTRA STUFF The author’s personal and GR pages Interviews -----Pen America - The PEN Ten: An Interview with Linda Rui Feng by Viviane Eng – definitely check this one out -----Literary Hub - Lit Hub Asks: 5 Authors, 7 Questions, No Wrong Answers Items of Interest -----A list of Feng’s publications -----Wiki on China’s Cultural Revolution Songs/Music ----- André Rieu plays Shostakovich - Gadfly Violin Concerto -----Maria Callasa singing Puccini - O mio babbino caro -----USSR Symphony Orchestra – conducted byt Yevgeny Svetlanov - Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov - Scheherazade: The Sea and Sinbad's Ship [Part 1/4] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Apr 25, 2021
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Jan 13, 2021
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0062954237
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| May 26, 2020
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it was amazing
| I was a particularly tiny child, so anyone who didn’t know me assumed I was a coward. The runt who always got bullied at school. But I wasn’t afrai I was a particularly tiny child, so anyone who didn’t know me assumed I was a coward. The runt who always got bullied at school. But I wasn’t afraid of fighting. I felt like I was bigger and stronger than everyone else—even if I knew that wasn’t really the case.Ilhan Omar arrived in the United states at age twelve. She and her family members were refugees from Somalia. Omar attended her first political caucus at fourteen, (acting as an interpreter for her grandfather) became a citizen at seventeen, a representative in the Minnesota House of Representatives at thirty-four and a Representative to the United States Congress at thirty-six. She established a couple of firsts in Minnesota, first Somali-American and first naturalized citizen from Africa to be elected to office, and she is one of the first two Muslim women elected to the national House of Representatives. Considering where she began, it is remarkable that she has been able to achieve as much as she has. [image] Representative Ilhan Omar - Image from The New Yorker This is What America Looks Like is Omar’s charming, very readable memoir, of her early life in Somalia, the immigration travails her family endured in trying to reach the United States, the adjustments she had to make in adapting to her new home, becoming an American, getting an education, finding a calling in public service and political activism, and working her way into the United States Congress. It is a classic rags-to-riches (well, not entirely, but more on that in a bit) story of someone who, with some help, pulled herself up by her bootstraps, made a home, and has done everything she can to make the district she represents and her new country a better place. [image] The board outside Omar’s Congressional office - Image from RollCall.com The book opens with a very charming tale of how constituents, and supporters from across the world covered the nameplate outside her office with Post-it notes carrying words of support. This caused a brief run-in with building maintenance, as, even with her staff relocating these messages to a space inside her office, the board kept filling up with new ones. This is an excellent omen, an accurate predictor of what a lovely read this book is. Not all fluff, of course. Much of what Omar writes about is deadly serious, but this is not a political tract. It really is about her life before her public service, and what made her the person she is now, chronicling the challenges she had to overcome to be in a position to do some good on a national level. One challenge was having to learn English. In her interview with Elle Magazine, she was asked about the particular show she watched that helped her master the language. The show was "Baywatch," the earlier years. [image] Rep. Ilhan Omar and her then two-year-old daughter, Isra Hirsi, on a trip to Sweden in 2005 – image from Elle Magazine We can expect that in any political memoir, there will be a lot of self-aggrandizement, in the same way that resumes tend to portray as wonderful parts of our lives that could use a bit of burnishing. But we do not really expect much by way of the less cheery side of her life. In addition to fleeing Somalis under fire, and surviving in refugee camps, she spends some time on her marriages, and even on a nervous breakdown that included, among other bad decisions, shaving her head. While she does not devote a lot of ink to this side of her experience, she certainly offers enough, and shows some guts in doing so. She also takes on the political mis-step that occurred when she suggested that the impact of AIPAC was at least in part due to the PACs monetary influence. She was immediately schooled on some of the terminology she had used, and offered a sincere sorry-now-I-know-better apology. She focuses a lot on her combativeness, a trait she had from a very early age. (See the quote at the top of this review) It’s a feature not a bug, and one that any effective legislator should have, to at least some degree. How much was from her mother dying when she was two? How much from spending more time with boys than girls? How much was innate is impossible to tell, but her assertiveness was very-much supported in Somalia by family who adored her, her father and grandfather in particular. Both men were educated. Her father worked in a government job helping to run the nation’s lighthouse network. Grandfather was particularly unusual in that he treated the women and girls in his family as equals. It is unclear how much difference was made by the fact that the family was relatively well-to-do, enough to have their own driver. But surely all contributed to constructing the Ilhan Omar we know. The tale of her four-year experience in refugee camps is chilling. A very close family member died there, along with many others who were carried off by starvation and disease. For a child who grew up in a relatively comfortable family, she has seen her share of hardship and human misery. Those experiences fuel her progressive legislative interests today. Studying nutrition, and working as a community nutrition educator in Minneapolis for several years in order to teach poor immigrants about what foods to buy, and how to prepare them, gave her an appreciation for the needs of the US-born poor as well as the challenges faced by new arrivals. But it was in community organizing that she found her real passion. Her experience in Somalia, in the camps and in American schools gave her plenty of experience contending with bullies. In a precinct caucus in 2014 she was beaten up by five people who were opposed to the candidate whose campaign she was managing. Her description of the politics within the Minneapolis Somali immigrant community was news to me and very eye-opening. It was also news to me that Omar has been able to work with legislators from across the aisle in both the Minnesota and United States Houses of Representatives to craft legislation. Hardly the extremist her opponents see through their red-tinted glasses. I never really found the idea of compromise to be a difficult one. I think oftentimes there are battles, and you have to pick which one to fight today and which one to live on to fight another day. There are seeds we have to plant in order for there to be an opportunity for someone to enjoy that shade tomorrow. - from the Salon interviewAnd it was even greater news to learn that one of her personal political heroes was a powerful leader from a conservative party. You will be very surprised when you find out who. On June 16, 2020, Omar’s father, Nur Omar Mohamed, 67, died of complications from Covid-19. Her relationship with her father is a very considerable element in this book, as it has been in her life. She respected and dearly loved her father, whose good opinion she cherished more than anyone’s. …with God, you can always pray. You can ask for forgiveness. But when Dad walked away, there was no begging for forgiveness. I never wanted to get myself in that position. - from the Salon interview [image] Omar with her father - image from CNN This is What America Looks Like is a remarkable political memoir. It is a very fast read. I blasted through this book in record time, for me, no skimming. Many readers could get through it in a single session. The odds are that you do not know all that much about Omar’s background. I know I didn’t, and I am someone who attends to things political more than the average reader. So there is that. You will learn about who she is beyond who she endorsed in this or that electoral race, what her positions are on a small list of national policy issues, and how the right chooses to vilify her, with their usual degree of honesty. Ilhan Omar has a remarkable story to tell and she tells it exceedingly well. Check this one out. You will not be sorry. Review first posted – June 19, 2020 Publication dates ----------May 26, 2020 - hardcover ----------July 27, 2021 - trade paperback =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages You might check out the comments added to images IO posted on Instagram, for a flavor of the sort of frothing, psychotic hatred she must endure, thinly veiled death threats included. Some could make a nice bit on Jimmy Kimmel’s Mean Tweets. Some, of course would be better off referred to the FBI for investigation. Interviews -----Elle - An Intimate Conversation Between Rep. Ilhan Omar and Her Daughter, Isra Hirsi by Isra Hirsi – Omar’s 17-year-old daughter -----NPR - Ilhan Omar On Her Memoir And Moving The Needle Toward Progressive Policies -----Salon - Rep. Ilhan Omar talks Trump: "People are ready for someone who isn't triggered" - by Dean Obeidallah -----LA Review of Books - That Better America for Everyone: Talking to Representative Ilhan Omar by Andy Fitch - outstanding and informative Items of Interest -----Literary Hub - an excerpt - Ilhan Omar on Her Early Days Getting Out the Vote -----The New Yorker - The Dangerous Bullying of Ilhan Omar by Masha Gessen – at the end of her piece Gessen says She performs neither humility nor gratitude. Specifically, as it pertains to Nancy Pelosi, there are passages in the book that constitute considerable public gratitude. So, given that Gessen wrote her piece in April 2019, it would seem that Omar has learned a thing or two since being elected to Congress. -----Vox - The controversy over Ilhan Omar and AIPAC money, explained by Matthew Iglesias -----The Guardian - The Squad: progressive Democrats reveal how they got their name by Edward Helmore -----Omar speaking out against destruction of property during protests -----Omar interviewed by Jake Tapper on What De-funding a Police Department looks like - a good look at a movement with a terrible slogan -----Omar quoted Maya Angelou’s poem Still I Rise in response to Trump-rally brownshirts chanting “Send her back” ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jun 03, 2020
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Jun 05, 2020
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Jun 05, 2020
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ebook
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1948226464
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| 4,225
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| Mar 03, 2020
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liked it
| I recognize the ways in which running is transforming me. Through it, I am inflicting violence on myself and my body, submerging myself in pain lik I recognize the ways in which running is transforming me. Through it, I am inflicting violence on myself and my body, submerging myself in pain like I did when I was working in the warehouse alongside my mother, so that I may control the turmoil within me. But unlike any other labor, running relieves me of the weight that I should become better than my parents, my people.Noé Alvarez was at the beginning of his adult life, but he had seen a few things. Growing up near Yakima, WA, at 17, he took a job in a fruit packaging plant where his mother had worked for decades, in order to bring a bit more income into the household. Even though he had worked in the fields and done other physical labor as a kid, it gave him a lot more appreciation for how hard her life had been for all those years and gave him also a feeling of pride in doing his job well. The area promotes itself as The Palm Springs of Washington. Uh, no. It is, however, the area from where Raymond Carver hails, and Carver has provided a less than Palm-Springs-like look at it in his fiction. Hard-scrabble would be a better description. The train tracks that demarcate the town into East and West are no longer representative of the division between poor and rich neighborhoods—only poor and slightly less poor…We still seem trapped in the cycles of Carver’s narratives, as if his words condemned us to a world of loneliness, tarnished relationships, and violence. Seen differently, his words urge youth like us to rewrite ourselves out of these sinkholes. To sprint out of them.His parents had urged him to get out, and it looks like he will. Alvarez is accepted to Whitman College, with a generous aid package. The Hispanic Academic Achievers Program helps out more, so he winds up with a free ride. Off to Walla Walla in 2002. [image] Alvarez running in the event – image from WBUR.ORG In April 2004, two years into his college experience, he hears a speaker on Peace and Dignity Journeys (PDJ), a North American run through indigenous communities, from Alaska to Panama, held every four years. Alvarez had done some running, but was hardly a seasoned long-distance runner. Struggling with the demands of college, and buying in to a negative stereotype of himself and Hispanics generally, he decides this is for him, even asking Whitman for some money to get him started on it. They fork some over, which seems pretty sweet of them. Gotta say, that if it had been my kid dropping out of a free-ride college deal after two years, I would have been less than excited. Why not wait until you get your degree and catch this train the next time through? Sounds like Noé’s parents felt similarly. The man giving the presentation, Pacquiao, warned him of the hardships, but presented it as an event that promoted unity among indigenous peoples. But ok, college was not going all that well for him, so maybe a break was called for. Like, every step of the way, college was a very difficult thing for me. And it happened to coincide then when I was 19 years old with the Peace and Dignity Journeys, a six-month-long run that's organized every four years. And so it kind of saved me. It came - it coincided perfectly. I said, I needed to get out. I couldn't face my family. This is an opportunity for me to kind of hit the restart button and go and figure myself out. - from the NPR interviewThis is how Noé Alvarez found his way to the PDJ, but it is not how the book opens. There are many people who participate in this megamarathon. In the opening, we get a peek at each of the main ones before the event, strobe-light flashes of where they were just before deciding to join, maybe what prompted them. We get a where-are-they-now at the end of the book, a nice book-end. There is also a discontinuity between the event and Alvarez writing about it. I definitely wasn't ready to tell a story at 19. It's a lifelong process to make meaning out of it. I talked to some of the runners and I checked in with them too. I said, "Look, this is what I remember about you, this time. Do you remember that?" They shared information with me that I had blocked out. Then I just got to writing them. I took it scene by scene, just getting it down and figuring it out later, not thinking about the bigger picture because there were so many components to it. Runner's story, my story, dad's story, mom's story. It's a day by day thing. That's how the run was. - from the Salon interviewAlvarez reports on his experiences on this massive run, how he personally endures (or not) the physical demands, his attempts to extract meaning and connection from the PDJ, and his struggle to forge a clearer sense of his identity. In the run, he is only nineteen years old, so there is plenty of identity left to construct. He also fills us in on the uplifting welcomes given the runners in some communities and the occasional hostility of others sharing the road, including being hit by rocks courtesy of passing motorists, and concerns like encountering a mountain lion while running solo in a remote location, or waking up with a back full of blisters, courtesy of some crickets, getting lost in Los Angeles or seeing his knees swell to the size of melons. Though the run was physically taxing on the body, Álvarez joked, “running is the easy part.” Getting along with flawed people with broken histories could be challenging under the best of circumstances. - from the WBUR interviewWe meet, again, the runners whom he joins on the torturous trek from Alaska to Panama. Not all will last for the entirety. One of the strong points of the book is the stories he hears while hanging around the equivalent of a campfire after each day of extreme running. This was a highlight. Interesting, but not so compelling was the dysfunction within the group. The people on the run did not exactly seem like the most welcoming sorts. It certainly works as a descriptive, but does not exactly make us feel all that supportive for many of the runners and managers in this enterprise. People are people, whatever their origin, so this is not a huge shock, but I guess I was hoping that among a group of people who were engaged in a six-month test of their endurance and commitment, it might have been a bit less like middle school with more booze, sex, and snottiness. On the other hand, I have been around positively-minded political people at various stages in my life, and while most are pretty nice, there always seem to be some who are just awful. So, probably, bad on me for having unreasonable expectations. [image] Alvarez today - image from NBC News There is a duality here. Alvarez wants to support and identify with his working-class family, while wanting to feel a connection to a wider world, maybe a chance to fulfill his parents’ wish for him to have a better life than they had had. I know, why can’t one manage both? But it seems that the author, now in his thirties, has made some sort of a divide between the two. I seek elsewhere the spiritual and philosophical truths that running provided me. But within myself I believe that these truths can be achieved without a college education. The world tells me that achievement has to look one way, but I struggle with that.I take serious issue here, as the author appears to be conflating university education with a search for philosophical truths. Sure, it serves that purpose for many people. But it is a meaningful tool that allows one, or at least helps one, to make a decent enough living in the real world that one can afford to continue such truth-seeking without having to scrounge for cash. And Alvarez had some post-college work that was doing some real social good. In a description of his more contemporary life, he is working at lower end jobs than he really needs to. One was as an overnight guard at a museum. Here I contend not only with the mental fatigue of museum silence, but the nervous reality that has haunted and pestered me all my life: that I will always be working class.No shite, Sherlock. Been there, done that. I have my own guard uniform tucked away as well, but unlike Noé, I never really doubted my class status, despite college and graduate school. Sure, some can get out, but for the vast majority, while we may swap collar colors, our relationship to real power remains where it began. And it is likely to remain that way for our children as well. It is called a class-based society, whether the slots we are born into are Indian castes, or striations in the increasingly ill-named American middle class. The clacking dress shoes over marble floors remind me that I am surrounded by people who know where they’re going in life. In these small spaces, even in the most trivial conversations, I pretend that I matter, that people value my insight into random matters of life, literature, and local events.I would not project any sort of peace or direction onto anyone based on the sounds their shoes make on a marble floor. I have worked with many such people, as has Alvarez, and they are as likely to be as unhappy, or as undirected, as anyone walking on softer rubber soles. And if that is not persuasive, a quick look at any decent newspaper coverage of things political or economic should disabuse one of such notions. And maybe some people do value what you have to say. You can be working class and still have something to contribute that is of value, beyond physical labor, if sweat-based work is not sufficient to offer the feelz you need. That this book exists is absolute proof of that. Speaking of which, some of Alvarez’s writing can be beautifully descriptive, while lyrically evocative. It is an ink wash of a world here in rainy Chiapas where we traverse steep highlands with heavy feet, mobbing about the clouds as if in some dream world that smells of firewood. Roads coil around remote Mayan villages that appear and disappear in the fog like ghost towns. The silhouettes of women hunching over the land can be seen in the clouds, working the land, and carrying bundles of firewood on their backs.And then it can sometimes be clunky, for which I blame editors more than Alvarez, unless, of course, things of this sort were raised and changes were overruled by the author. My eye sockets sink with exhaustion… Not likely. Maybe your eyes sink, or it feels like they are sinking, within the sockets, but I expect the sockets stayed exactly where they were. Another. When the rhythms of working-class life cut inside me like broken beer glass, I run. Maybe broken beer bottle glass? What is, actually, broken beer? This sort of thing should result in DMV-like points on one’s poetic license. One further concern. Much is made of the importance of this run to healing. It was never clear enough to me how exactly that worked. Maybe I was missing something. Always a possibility. But repeating what sounded to me like a mantra about how this was about healing and that was about healing without really explaining how, made me feel in need of some healing of my own. There are plenty of wrongs that have been foisted on indigenous people. How does this run help heal those lesions? It sounded to me like a line of political truism taken in, and repeated, by a new, young (19) adherent, who was fully on board, but who did not yet have a deep grasp of the content under the slogan. I am not saying there was not healing of some sort going on, just that it could have used a bit more explication. I did like, in Alvarez’s introductory remarks on the NCRL site, (linked in EXTRA STUFF), his piece about running as a form of connection and prayer. The road is a classic image of the journey of self-discovery. We expect our narrator to begin in one place, both physically and emotionally or psychologically, and end his road trip someplace else, both internally and externally. I am struck ultimately by how little this run actually seemed to impact the author’s life. There is an immediate result, though. He does return to school, completing his expected education and much more, doing work that is of obvious value in the world. Yet finds insufficient psychic reward in that. Surprisingly, he seems no closer to finding what he was looking for years after the event than he was before he joined. While Alvarez may have picked up a nice trove of tales to tell, it was not at all clear that there was enough growth here to write about, given where he is when he writes the story. Does Alvarez feel more connected to his indigenous brothers and sisters, the indigenous communities through which the run passed? Sure. But what does one do with that? Is this a purely personal effort? Does it lead him to look for ways to help support Native American communities, or groups, after the race was over? If so, it was not obvious. He seems shifted more to a generic desire to help poor people. It seemed a very personal journey, despite the initial rationale, and his initial enthusiasm for being included. Which leads one to consider whether this was the intent. He even admits it was a need for a personal restart that was a great motivator. Maybe not all journeys really take you somewhere. Intended or not, that was where this one dropped me off. But the run certainly helped Alvarez embrace who he was at one level, furthering his sense of connection with his family. ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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May 24, 2020
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Jun 03, 2020
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May 24, 2020
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Hardcover
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1640093141
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| 4.27
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| Jun 02, 2020
| Jun 02, 2020
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it was amazing
| What do you do when you have nothing left? Nowhere to go? What kind of person are you forced to become? What do you do when you have nothing left? Nowhere to go? What kind of person are you forced to become?This is a tale of two desperate men, driven from their homeland by greed and inhumanity, seeking a new life in a new place. But there are no direct flights from the one to the other, not for working class people like Seidu Mohammed and Razak Iyal. Theirs is an odyssey that takes them from Ghana to Brazil, through South and Central America and into the United States, where we first meet them. [image] Joe Meno - image from Counterpoint Seidu and Razak had first met each other in a Minneapolis bus station. Out of options in the US, both were determined to cross into Canada, neither knowing much about how to go about it. As they head to the border they must walk the last batch of miles on foot, in the face of a withering winter storm, with sub-zero temperatures and cruel winds, lacking the extra protective clothing anyone would need to survive such an ordeal. It is this life and death struggle which opens the book and to which we return at the end of most chapters. How could anyone survive such conditions? Do they make it? And if either of them does, at what cost? The bulk of the book is their alternating personal histories and subsequent horror stories. Ever since he was a kid, Seidu had been a gifted footballer. He aspired to play professionally, and did, in Ghana. We follow his career as he steadily moves up to more competitive teams. When offered a chance to try out for a professional Brazilian team, he travels there with his coach. But his life takes a dramatic turn when that coach catches him in bed with a man. This might be a scandal in many countries, but for a Ghanaian, it is life-threatening. Publicly outed as a bisexual, he could be arrested back home, beaten, jailed, maybe even killed. His coach has made it clear that he will broadcast this to everyone in Ghana. Seidu’s career in his home country is over, and probably any hopes for a professional football career anywhere. Thus begins Seidu’s journey. [image] Seidu Mohammed – image from The Believer Razak Iyal’s problems were quite different, but no less terrifying. The first son of a man who remarried, having several more children, Razak is denied his inheritance when his father dies. His evil stepmother, incredibly selfish half siblings, indifferent, corrupt police and a corrupt political figure conspire to take what was rightfully his. His half-siblings threaten to kill him if he does not shut up about it. A few murder attempts later Razak flees the country. Their two stories follow a similar route and tell a similar tale. Both begin their American journey in Brazil, Seidu by happenstance, Razak by virtue of the fact that it was the only county to which he could get a visa. Theirs are horrifying stories of the perils of refugees seeking asylum. They are preyed upon by extortion-minded police and human traffickers in country after country, being repeatedly cheated, robbed, and attacked. The little solace they find comes mostly from fellow emigrants, and only rarely from locals. The misery may take a different form once they cross into the USA, but it is a horror story nonetheless. Both men have a deep religious faith, and turn to the almighty to see them through the worst of their travails, putting their fates in His hands. It looks like God could use a little help. Over the past thirty years a nearly invisible network of uncoordinated, small-scale smugglers had evolved into a highly organized enterprise. As the tide of migrants traveling to the United States grew throughout the twenty-first century, what was once a low-level, oftentimes family-run operation had become a multibillion-a-year business. Criminal organizations—including transnational drug traffickers—began to use human smuggling as an additional revenue source to support other illicit activities.The portrait painted here is of an enterprise that preys on the desperate. Not just the human traffickers and the thugs with whom they work, but the police who demand money from the migrants, using their government-sanctioned authority as a weapon against the defenseless. Meno points out that for many living in the communities the migrants traverse, feeding on the frightened and disarmed is among their few sources of income. It reminded me of lions feasting on wildebeests as they make their annual migrations. There was almost nothing to distinguish one country from another anymore. The sagging palm trees, their long leaves covered in dust; the rough, beige land; the cast-off clothes people wore; all of it was irreducible, continuous, a single continent that time had made plain by poverty. Dilapidated stores with metal bars covering their windows and doors, bleak-looking cell phone shops, travel agencies that appeared to have closed years before, all seemed strangely familiar. Shop after shop, business after business, built around the unending flood of migrants that passed along otherwise empty-seeming streets.When they finally present themselves to US officials at the border, expecting decent treatment, they are thrust into a proprietary detention system with a very Kafka-esque feel. Under current UN protocols, anyone who presents themselves at a port of entry or from inside the country can apply for asylum as long as they put forward an application within one year of their arrival.Thus begins a lengthy period in which they are incarcerated, denied legal assistance, lied to by prison authorities, and are largely cut off from contact with their families. Since opening in 1994, the Eloy facility has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in profit and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Its existence, and the rapid development of many other private prisons and detention facilities over the past few decades, call into question the ethics of an industry that benefits from an inefficient immigration system. The more migrants who are detained, the longer the length of their detainment, the more these businesses have to gain. At any one time, nearly 40,000 asylum seekers are held in ICE facilities, with more than 70 percent of these individuals being imprisoned in privately run detention centers throughout the country.This is a non-fiction book written by a writer of fiction. I was totally taken in while reading, even though I knew when I started that this was a work of non-fiction, griping in my notes about how the author had reverted to an expository form at times. Oh, wait. So, you will be engaged. Seidu and Razak are decent people, everyman migrants faced with overwhelming and unfair obstacles. It is hard to read on with dry eyes, both during the darkness of the horrors they endure, and the much rarer bright lights of human empathy. Sadly, this epic struggle for freedom is a tale as old as humanity, or, in this instance, inhumanity. In bringing us the stories of these two desperate men, Joe Meno, in putting names and faces to the scourge of the global refugee crisis has shined a light on a particularly dark underside of the immigration experience. It is one that poor and working-class immigrants know all too well, but one that will come as a shock to most readers. The contemporary monetization of immigrant struggles has given us an exploitation-fueled Underworld Gauntlet in place of a hope-filled Underground Railroad. As troubling is that there are so many places on this planet where corruption rules, and decency, in order to survive, is forced to hide or flee, fueling the vast human migration we now have. We can only hope that this harsh, moving story can be shared with enough people that public concern will grow, and immigration policy can be moved from the draconian and profit-based to one that promotes a higher valuation of inherent humanity. This is a dark journey I urge you to make, through one of the outstanding books of 2020. The International Bill of Human Rights states Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution. It would be a wonderful, and just thing, if that right were recognized in practice as well as in law, if we could offer more than Mr. Kurtz’s rueful final words in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “'The horror! The horror!” Razak recalled the feelings he had faced back in Ghana, unable to negotiate the corrupt bureaucracy, the systems of power that had been put in place. He had traveled thousands of miles only to find, once again, his life beset with obstacles put down by outside forces, controlled by a faceless government. We can send you wherever we want. Review posted – May 29, 2020 Publication dates ----------June 2, 2020 - hardcover ----------June 22, 2021 - trade paperback I received a review copy of this book from Counterpoint. It was welcomed with open arms. =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages Joe Meno is an award winning novelist, short-fiction and comic-strip writer, playwright, and journalist. He teaches fiction writing at Columbia College in Chicago. Between Everything and Nothing is his tenth book. By Joe Meno -----BelieverMag - an excerpt from the book -----Electric Lit - Pieces by Meno on this site ----- TriQuarterly - Homo Sapiens -----Goreyesque - The Use of Medicine -----Selected Shorts - Everything Strange and Unknown - audio – 30:59 -----This Land Magazine - Driver’s Ed Items of Interest -----The Universal Declaration of Human Rights -----The International Bill of Human Rights -----LitHub-Defining the Ethics of the Writer and Journalist’s Gaze by Spencer Wolff -----(view spoiler)[CBC - We can't forget about that night': 1 year later, refugees recall near-fatal Christmas Eve walk across border by Austin Grabish [image] Razak Iyal, left, and Seidu Mohammed, right, said they want to wish Canadians a happy holiday season and thank everyone who's helped them over the last year in Canada. - Image and text from the CBC article (hide spoiler)] -----California Sunday Magazine - “When can we really rest?” More migrants than ever are crossing the Colombia-Panama border to reach the U.S. Five days inside the Darién Gap, one of the most dangerous journeys in the world by Nadja Drost - Photographs by Carlos Villalón, Bruno Federico, and Lisette Poole Books of Interest ----- The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad-full text on Gutenberg -----The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead -----A review of Exit West in The New Yorker - by JiaTolentino -----The Line Becomes a River ...more |
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May 17, 2020
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May 23, 2020
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May 22, 2020
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1982121491
| 9781982121495
| 1982121491
| 4.04
| 4,452
| Nov 24, 2020
| Nov 24, 2020
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it was amazing
| “What did they see, Mama?” I murmured to her. “What was it that came to meet the birds that flew into the west?” “What did they see, Mama?” I murmured to her. “What was it that came to meet the birds that flew into the west?”--------------------------------------- …not all migrations end with a return home. Every memory begins to cut if you hold onto it too tight.Reading Zeyn Joukhadar’s The Thirty Names of Night is like walking through an incredibly rich and diverse aviary. Our attention is drawn to each flying thing as it comes into our visual range. No sooner do we coo at the beauty of the last than another feathered image hops into view. As in an actual aviary, there is an entrance and an exit. The flocks, and individuals, provide a landscape as we pass through dips and rises in the path, arriving at recognitions as we reach the end. There is a lot going on here. [image] Zeyn Joukhadar - image from his FB profile pix There are three generations and two alternating narrators in this beautiful novel. The twenty-something unnamed (well, for most of the book anyway) narrator is busy creating a mural in what once was Little Syria, before the neighborhood was mostly razed to make the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and the World Trade Center. One of the last remnants is an old community house. Led by an owl (not the Hogwarts sort, although it does, in a way, carry a message) to a particular place inside the building, he discovers a hidden journal, left by a woman missing for sixty years, a woman his mother had very much admired. He had been looking for clues to his late mother’s life in her old neighborhood, so this is a rich find. [image] “The Syrian Colony” – image from Paris Review article Laila Z was a Syrian immigrant, whose family moved from their troubled home to New York in the 1930s, when she was a teenager. In addition to the usual emotional trauma of such a move, Laila was broken-hearted at having to leave the love of her life. In New York, she begins writing to her lost love, whom we know only as “B” or “little wing.” Laila’s journal makes up half the story. Our contemporary narrator tells his story as he talks to his late mother, whose ghost he can see. Chapters alternate. [image] Canada Goose Learning about Laila’s life reveals an unsuspected history of gay and trans people from another era. Laila and our unnamed narrator have much in common. Laila was born in Syria, the narrator was born in the USA of Syrian stock. Laila was a gifted painter of birds. Our narrator is as well, using chalk instead of aquatint. Laila, in the 1930s, dared to love outside the acceptable norms of her culture. Our narrator finds himself struggling to find his way while born into a female body. [image] A Hudhud or Hoopoe - image from Oiseaux.net There is a mystery at the center that keeps things moving along. Laila had made a name for herself in the USA as an exceptional artist, specializing in birds. One pair she drew was a new species she had seen, nesting in New York, Geronticus simurghus, a kind of ibis. It is known that she’d done so, but the final image had never been found. Through a friend, our contemporary narrator meets Qamar, the granddaughter of a black ornithologist who’d worked in the 1920s and 1930s. He had been the first to describe this new species, but had never been taken seriously, in the absence of corroboration. Laila’s missing artwork would provide that, and allow Qamar to complete her grandfather’s work. What happened to that piece, and what became of Laila? G. simurghus was named by its discoverer for a character in the Persian poem The Conference of the Birds. If Simorgh unveils its face to you, you will findThe central, peripheral, overhead, and underfoot imagery in this novel is BIRDS. This includes tales from ancient classics, like the one above. Joukhadar infuses nearly every page with birds, real, magically real, drawn, painted, folded, and sometimes by allusion. Flocks appear, to enhance events. Goldfinches swarm during a building demolition. Forty-eight sparrows fall from the sky on the fifth anniversary of the narrator’s mother’s death. The first funeral I attended was held under a black froth of wings. The deceased was a crow that had been gashed in the belly by a red-tailed hawk…That was the day my body started conspiring against me. I’d gotten my period.B makes Laila a gift, a piece of a dead kite they had tried to save, fallen feathers stitched back to make a magnificent silver-white wing. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Our narrator’s mother had been an ornithologist. A close friend of his mother operates a bird-rescue aviary in Queens. An evening at a club entails people dancing, using very bird-like movements. Birds are both expressions of freedom and reflections of a divine presence. They are manifestations of underlying forces and sources of purest love and beauty. They are a means by which people connect with other people. [image] Passenger Pigeon by Robert Havell - image from the National Gallery of Art As our contemporary narrator struggles through finding the answer to the rest of Laila’s story, and figuring out what had happened to that special aquatint, he struggles as well with defining who he is. This is something with which Joukhadar is familiar. Zeyn came out publicly in Spring 2019 as transgender, and is now using he/him pronouns. This is not the only transition he has gone through. After earning a Ph.D in Medical Sciences from Brown, and working as a researcher for several years, he moved on to pursuing writing as a full-time gig. He is very interested in the immigrant experience, and the status of Muslims in the USA. I am tied by blood to Syria, and the country where my father was born is suffering while the country in which I was born still views us as not fully American. Where, then, does that leave me? And for people of Syrian descent living in diaspora, particularly for the generation of children who will grow up in exile because their parents left Syria for safety reasons, what can we take with us? What do we carry with us that cannot be lost? - from the Goodreads interview [image] Yellow Crowned Night Heron - by John James Audubon - image from Wayfair Go slowly through this one. There is much to take in, from the avian imagery to the tales of Laila and our narrator, from the flight from Syria to making a home in Manhattan’s Little Syria, from the destruction of that neighborhood to its migration to Brooklyn, from bloody events summoning revelations to love and connection across generations, from the real to the magical, from a portrait of a long-ago place to a look at today, from a place of not knowing to seeing truths beneath the surface. The Thirty Names of Night is a remarkable novel. Spread your wings, catch a thermal and hover. Take in the considerable landscape of content and artistry provided here. This aviary is very tall and there is so much to see. We parted. I wiped my face with the back of my hand. Review posted – June 5, 2020 Publication dates ----------Hardcover was supposed to be May 19, 2020 – but got CV19’d to November 3, 2020 ----------Trade paperback - July 13, 2021 I received an ARE of this book from Atria in return for a few seeds, worms, and some extra twigs for nest fortifications. =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter, GR, Instagram, and FB pages Interviews - for his earlier book – recent interviews have eluded me -----The Booklist Reader- Syria and Synesthesia: An Interview with Debut Author Zeyn Joukhadar By Biz Hyzy -----Goodreads - Debut Author Snapshot: Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar Songs/Music -----Fairuz - Ya Tayr -----Little Wing - Hendrix (live) -----The Wind Beneath My Wings Items of Interest -----Paris Review - Little Syria by Angela Serratore -----Wikipedia- Little Syria -----The National - The battle to save New York's 'Little Syria' from being forgotten -----6SqFt - The history of Little Syria and an immigrant community’s lasting legacy- by Dana Schulz -----Adubon’s Birds of America -----Birds in Islamic Culture -----The Cornell Lab Bird Academy - Everything You Need To Know About Feathers by Mya Thompson ----- Public Domain Review - Marvels of Things Created and Miraculous Aspects of Things Existing by Qazwini -----Wikipedia - The Conference of the Birds by Maqāmāt-uṭ-Ṭuyūr ...more |
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May 10, 2020
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May 24, 2020
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May 10, 2020
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0525562028
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| 0525562028
| 4.04
| 313,344
| Jun 04, 2019
| Jun 04, 2019
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it was amazing
| I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an indi I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink of an eye, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you’re born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly…sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.Take one beam of light. Direct it through a prism. It will separate into its component colors. Reading Ocean Vuong is a bit like this. He takes words, images, and concepts, beams them through his prismatic, gravitic artistry, and the result is a spreading rainbow, bending in several directions. It is a bit of a trip reading On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Go ahead, take the Vuong acid. This is a trip worth taking. [image] Ocean Vuong - image from The Guardian - credit Adrian Pope On Earth… is not all straightforward story-telling, although there is plenty of that in here. It is a mix of elements. The parts. The form. Little Dog is writing an extended letter to his mother, Rose, telling her of his experiences, a letter she will not, cannot ever read. He had tried teaching her to read English, but she gave up in short order, claiming that she had gotten that far being able to see, so did not really need it. Uncomfortable, too, with the dis-order of a child teaching a parent. The story of helping at the nail salon where she worked, where the workers inhale culture as well as toxic chemicals. In the nail salon, sorry is a tool one used to pander until the word itself becomes currency. It no longer merely apologizes, but insists, reminds: I'm here, right here, beneath you. It is the lowering of oneself so that the client feels right, superior, and charitable. In the nail salon, one’s definition of sorry is deranged into a new work entirely, one that’s charged and reused as both power and defacement at once. Being sorry pays, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self-deprecating syllable the mouth allows. Because the mouth must eat.The History. Family. Little Dog tells of his grandmother, Lan, in Viet Nam, marrying a GI, bearing him a child, Little Dog’s mother. Being left behind when the USA fled. His history with his grandmother, their closeness, how she protected him as much as she could. When he was tasked with plucking the white hairs from her head, she would tell him stories. As I plucked, the blank walls around us did not so much fill with fantastical landscapes as open to them, the plaster disintegrating to reveal the past behind it. Scenes from the war, mythologies of manlike monkeys, of ancient ghost catchers from the hills of Da Lat who were paid in jugs of rice wine, who traveled through villages with packs of wild dogs and spells written on palm leaves to dispel evil spirits.The story of his mother, growing up in Viet Nam, ostracized for being too white, her PTSD as an adult, and how that manifested as physical abuse of her son. Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are.The story of Little Dog’s contending with the dual challenges of being a yellow boy in a white place, (Hartford, Connecticut), in the poorer parts, and a gay one, to boot. Coming of age as a gay male teenager, first experiencing sex and a lasting relationship, until well, you’ll see. [image] Ocean Vuong aged two with his mother and aunt at Philippines refugee camp - image from 2017 Guardian interview The story of his relationship with his American grandfather, and a secret in that bond. He writes about Tiger Woods, offering some history of how he came by his name, and wonders why Woods is only very rarely referred to as half-Asian. There is much consideration of language. In an interview with PBS, Vuong talked about how in Vietnamese culture, farm workers would sing as they worked, merging the action of their bodies with the rhythms of the songs and poems. Other elements contribute to his perspective. Vuong talks about his struggles in school. Reading was particularly hard, and he suspects that dyslexia runs in his family, though he says now: “I think perhaps the disability helped me a bit, because I write very slowly and see words as objects. I’m always trying to look for words inside words. It’s so beautiful to me that the word laughter is inside slaughter.” - from The RumpusHe writes of the body as a form of language. I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son. If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron…And It’s in these moments, next to you, that I envy words for doing what we can never do—how they can tell all of themselves simply by standing still, simply by being.The sadness of loss permeates. Little Dog has his own losses to grieve, his mother and grandmother far more. But there is recognition, also, that the trials of the past have allowed for some of the good things of the present. This is not a pity party. Gruesomeness, having to do with macaques, is very far from gorgeous, but is fleeting, and can be seen as an image of the darkest sort of colonialism. There is also LOL humor in the occasional mismatch of cultures. Vuong can start off a chapter writing about a table, for example, and turn that into a labyrinth, that winds, bends and turns, and somehow winds up back at the table. Very Somebody spoke and I went into a dream. This is one of the more quotable books you will read. A few: Freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and the prey.You get the idea. And plenty more where those came from. While this is a small book in size, it is neither a slight, nor an easy read. You do not have to be a poet, or a fan of poetry to appreciate the wonderfulness of this book, but it wouldn’t hurt. The stories Ocean Vuong tells are clear and very accessible, but the linguistic gymnastics can leave you needing to uncross your eyes, more than once. But gymnastics are stimulating too, and might loosen up some latent cranial muscles. We may or may not be gorgeous briefly, or at all, but this book is a work of surpassing beauty, and will remain so forever. Review first posted – December 13, 2019 Publication dates ==========June 4, 2019 - hardcover ==========June 1, 2021 - Trade paperback [image] [image] [image] [image] =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Tumblr and Instagram pages Vuong is an award-winning poet. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is his first novel. Interviews -----The Paris Review – June 5, 2019 - Survival as a Creative Force: An Interview with Ocean Vuong - by Spencer Quong -----The Guardian – June 9, 2019 - Ocean Vuong: ‘As a child I would ask: What’s napalm?’- by Emma Brockes -----The Creative Independent – May 16, 2017 - Ocean Vuong on being generous in your work -----LA Review of Books – Article is from June 2019, but the interview was done in 2017 - Failing Better: A Conversation with Ocean Vuong - by Viet Thanh Nguyen -----The Guardian – October 3, 2017 - War baby: the amazing story of Ocean Vuong, former refugee and prize-winning poet - by Claire Armistead Items of Interest -----Excerpt – The New Yorker published this piece from Vuong on May 13, 2017. It is essentially an excerpt from the book. A Letter to My Mother That She Will Never Read -----The Rumpus – a 2014 piece by Vuong - The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes, and Visible Desperation -----The Guardian - April 2, 2022 - Ocean Vuong: ‘I was addicted to everything you could crush into a white powder’ by Lisa Allardice - on his upcoming book, but with relevant intel on the author independent to that ...more |
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Dec 03, 2019
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Oct 13, 2019
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| 4.26
| 154,230
| Mar 05, 2019
| Mar 05, 2019
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it was amazing
| I was born without a voice, one cold, overcast day in Brooklyn, New York. No one ever spoke of my condition. I did not know I was mute until years I was born without a voice, one cold, overcast day in Brooklyn, New York. No one ever spoke of my condition. I did not know I was mute until years later, when I’d opened my mouth to ask for what I wanted and realized no one could hear me.Deya Ra’Ad, a Brooklyn teenager, had been raised by people who guarded old-world beliefs and customs. It was expected of her that she would agree to marry one of the Muslim suitors who passed her family’s muster, and begin producing babies as soon as possible, and as for having a separate career, a separate identity, well, not so much. It could have been worse. She could have had her mother’s life. This is a tale of three generations of women told primarily in two time periods. Isra Hadid, was born and raised in Palestine. We follow her story from 1990 when she was 17. She dreamed of finding someone to share her life with, someone to love. Isra cleared her throat. “But Mama, what about love?”Isra looooooved reading A Thousand and One Nights, a book that holds special meaning for her. The book would come to her aid in years to come. Isra was married off as a teen and moved with her new husband, Adam, from her home in Palestine to Brooklyn. No land of milk and honey for her. She was barely allowed out of the family’s house. Had no friends. Did not speak the language. Husband worked mad hours for his father. Mother-in-law was more of a prison warden than a support. Isra was expected to produce babies, preferably boys. And pregnancy happened, soon, and frequently. But sorry, girls only, which was considered a source of shame. So was allowing her face to be seen by anyone after her disappointed, worked-nearly-to-death, increasingly alcoholic husband beat the crap out of her for no good reason. The shame was on her, for she must have done something to have earned the assault, the shame of a culture in which dirty laundry was washed clean of indicating marks, and only the victim was hung out to dry. Keeping up with the Khans was of paramount importance, in reputation, if not necessarily in material wealth, in perceived propriety, and, of course, in the production of male heirs. Isra struggles with feeling affection for her daughters as each new daughter becomes a reason for her husband to hate her even more. As if post-partum depression were not enough of a challenge to cope with, post-partum shaming and assault is added to the mix. Already a quiet young woman, Isra becomes even more withdrawn as she is subjected to relentless criticism, denigration, soul-crushing loneliness, and even physical abuse. She is largely left to her own devices, is hampered even by a hostile mother-in-law, and finds no support system in other Islamic women in Brooklyn. Of course, being kept on a cultural-religious leash which was basically strapped to the household kitchen and nursery made it all but impossible for her to even have a chance to make social connections. Have a nice day. [image] Etaf Rum - from her site We follow Deya Ra’Ad from 2008 when she is eighteen, and under pressure from her grandparents to choose a husband. Her journey is two-pronged. We accompany her as she does battle with her family, wanting to have her own choices. They may come from a Palestinian background, but Deya was born in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, New York, USA, New World, and is not ok with feeling forced into a set of rules that not only is alien to this place, but which she finds personally indefensible. We also tag along as she tries to peel back carefully guarded family secrets. She and her siblings have been raised by her father’s parents since she was eight, her parents having been killed in an auto accident, an event that has always been clouded in mystery. She does not remember any warmth between her parents, even remembers some of the abuse her mother had endured. We want to learn more about the circumstances of Isra and Adam’s passing, and so does Deya. Finally, Fareeda Ra’Ad, Adam’s mother, Isra’s mother-in-law, Deya’s grandmother, comes in for a look. Not nearly so much as Deya and Isra, but enough to get a sense of what her life was like, and how her experiences helped shape the person she became. She is pretty much a gorgon to Isra, but we get to see a bit of how she became so awful, getting some sense of why she clings so doggedly to beliefs and customs that are hardly in her own interest. One day a mysterious woman leaves a message for Deya on the steps of her grandparents’ house, which raises even more questions. Might her mother still be alive? Pursuing this lead, she begins to get answers to many of her questions. But even with new knowledge, Deya is still faced with difficult choices, and still has to cope with some difficult people. The stories of Deya and Isra in particular are compelling. We can probably relate more to Deya who is straddling two worlds with a firmer foot in the new than her mother ever had, being able to act on the questions and concerns she shared with her mother. But Isra’s story is gripping as well. We keep hoping for her to find a way to make things better, boost our hopes for her when chance opportunities present for her to alleviate her suffering, her isolation. One element that permeates the novel is the notion of reading, or books, as sources not only of learning but of comfort, company, hopefulness, and inspiration. Isra’s love for Arabian Nights is palpable, and an affection she passed on to her daughter. It is an interest that is revived in Brooklyn when a relation notices Isra’s affection for reading and begins providing her with books. Isra carves out precious personal time in which to read, a necessary salve in a wounded life. “A Thousand and One Nights?” Sarah paused to think. “Isn’t that the story of a king who vows to marry and kill a different woman every night because his wife cheats on him.”Isra, Daya, and Fareeda’s stories are the means by which Etaf Rum fills us in on a largely overlooked aspect of contemporary life. There are Palestinian, immigrant and American-born, women who have been and who continue to be subjected to outrageous treatment by their communities, by their families, by their spouses, solely because of their gender. She points out the culture of self-blaming and social shaming that aids and abets the brutalization, and virtual enslavement of many such women. I do not know if Rum intended her book to reflect on the wider Arabic culture, or on practices in Islamic cultures in diverse nations, so will presume, for the moment, that her focus is intended specifically for Palestinian women. A Woman is Not a Man is not just a riveting story of the trials of immigration, but a powerful look at the continuation of a culture of socio-economic sexual dimorphism that treats males as rightful beings and females as second-class citizens at best, breeding-stock or slaves at worst. The book put me in mind of several other notable works. Exit West is another recent novel that looks at the stark differences in Middle Eastern versus Western cultures through the experiences of an immigrant couple. A Thousand Splendid Suns shows the oppression of women in Afghanistan under an extremist religious regime. Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows considers East-West strains in a London Punjabi community. 2018’s Educated shows a more domestic form of oppression of women, foisted by an extreme form of Mormonism. What Rum has provided with A Woman is No Man is a look at a particular set of women who have been suffering for centuries without the benefit of much public awareness. “Silence is the only option for Palestinian women suffering domestic violence, even here in America, and I hope to give voice to these women in my…novel.” - Etaf RumOne thing that I particularly appreciated was that Rum put the men’s brutality into some context, not treating it as some immutable male characteristic, or excusing it, but pointing out that it had an origin in the wider world, and showing how women could come to accept the unacceptable. The wounds of her childhood—poverty, hunger, abuse—had taught her. That the traumas of the world were inseparably connected. She was not surprised when her father came home and beat them mercilessly, the tragedy of the Nakba [The 1948 Palestinian diaspora] bulging in his veins... She knew that the suffering of women started in the suffering of men, that the bondages of one became the bondages of the other. Would the men in her life have battered her had they not been battered themselves?Still, might have been a decent thing for them to have exercised a bit of self-control, maybe take their rage out by shooting at bottles or something. It did her no good for Isra to leave Palestine only to be caged up in Bay Ridge. With our national proclamation of secular authority and religious tolerance, and even with the anti-Islamic sentiment that set in after 9/11, the USA should still be an excellent place for Islamic people to be able to practice their faith, free of the oppression that afflicts so many Eastern nations, in which one branch of Islam outlaws the practices of other sorts. But if Islamic people who come to or are born in the USA are not allowed to participate as Americans, but only as foreigners living on American soil, where is the gain, for them or the nation? There may not be a thousand and one tales in Etaf Rum’s impressive novel, which should be an early candidate for sundry national awards recognition, and will certainly be one of the best books of 2019, and we can expect that there will be more unfortunate women who will suffer miserably unfair lives that no Sheherezade can spare them, but one can still hope that the tales told by Etaf Rum may open at least a few eyes, touch at least a few hearts, offer some a feeling of community, or at least a sense of not being totally alone, spare at least some the dark fates depicted here, and hopefully inspire others to action. Patience can be a virtue, but in excess it can function as a powerful link in a chain keeping the present far too attached to an unacceptable past. Rum’s book is a powerful story, one that impatiently calls the world’s attention to the plight of Palestinian women, an oppressed minority within an oppressed minority, and proclaims rather than asks, “Can you hear me now?” Review first posted – December 14, 2018 Publication -----March 5, 2019 (USA) hardcover -----February 4, 2020 Trade paperback [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below, in comment #3 [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Nov 06, 2018
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Dec 02, 2018
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Nov 27, 2018
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Hardcover
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1439138311
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| 3.71
| 121,553
| Apr 29, 2009
| May 05, 2009
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really liked it
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Brooklyn is a wonderful character portrait and captures as well the struggle of an Irish immigrant to the US in the post war world. Eilis Lacy is a tw
Brooklyn is a wonderful character portrait and captures as well the struggle of an Irish immigrant to the US in the post war world. Eilis Lacy is a twenty-something in a small Irish town, frustrated at the sclerotic nature of her environment. Her life lies ahead of her in a single, entirely predictable line and she feels suffocated. She wants to study, to learn accountancy, or at least bookkeeping, so she can rise a little above her lowly economic situation. Seizing an unexpected opportunity, she sails for America and begins to make a life for herself in Brooklyn. [image] Colm Tóibín - from the LA Times Toibin finds small-townishness, of the good-and-warm, but also the negative-and-intrusive sorts, in both worlds. His portrayal of boarding house life in New York is classic. It is matched by his ability to show the appeal of Eilis’ home town. Ultimately Eilis must decide where her future lies. [image] Saoirse Ronan as Eilis - she dazzles in the role Eilis Lacey is a fully realized character you will be able to relate to, someone you will remember. Her concerns may have been set in a particular time and place (or places as the case may be), but the issues she faces are no less true for people of many eras from all over the worl who take on the huge challenge of immigration. This is not an action-oriented page turner, no shoot-outs or car chases, literal or figurative. Instead it is a beautifully written, patiently paced tale that is well worth the reading. =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, and FB pages An article in The Guardian from October 10, 2015 - Colm Tóibín on filming his novel Brooklyn: 'Everyone in my home town wanted to be an extra' An NPR interview of Toibin by Jacki Lyden An article from The Telegraph - May 21, 2015 - by Olivia Parker - Colm Tóibín: Writing is always a battle against your own laziness Saw the film on Tuesday. It is magnificent! ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Jun 2010
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Jun 16, 2010
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Hardcover
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