poverty

Book 40 for 2024: “If We Are Brave: Essays from Black Americana”, Theodore R. Johnson

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Johnson, a columnist for The Washington Post, notes that the US was founded on a set of ideals but for much of its history agreement on what those are ideals are has not existed. What are these ideals, who are they for? Today there is little agreement on much of this. There seems to be a lack of a common vision on what a democratic system is and should be and for whom. The essays in this book address these questions both today and from the origins of the country when only white men who owned land could vote. This book also discusses how different races in the country and the changing predominance of cultures affects the ideals people hold and the kind of country they envision for themselves.

As a Black man who is a retired Navy Commander, he also discusses his own experience, extensive research, and personal views. This short book is an excellent primer on how different races and cultures experience living in this country and their varying visions of the meaning of democracy.

Book 38 for 2024: “James”, Percival Everett

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If you ever read “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain, then you already know the characters in this new novel. If you have not read about Huck, then I suggest you might want to read Cliff Notes or some other synopsis of Twain’s novel. “James” takes its title from the name of one of the main characters, a slave who lives in Hannibal, Missouri. He is generally called Jim, but in reality prefers the more formal James. Basically, Everett’s novel is written from the viewpoint of James, e.g Jim. Most of the major events in Twain’s original novel are followed in this novel, but from James’ viewpoint. Huck, a poor kid, runs away to avoid his violent father and finds James hiding out on an island in the Mississippi River. Together they live off the land, float in their handmade raft down the Mississippi River, mostly at night to avoid anyone seeing them, and meet all sorts of folks, including two men, who are criminals pretending to be European royalty. It is hard to imagine how a novel about the horrors of slavery could possess any humor, but this one does. It is a quick, enlightening, and entertaining read filled with “lessons” that do not seem to be lessons because they are so intertwined with the James’ story.

Book 33 for 2024: “Three Daughters of Eve”, Elif Shafak

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Shafak is a popular Turkish writer. One of my all time favorite books is her novel about the life of Rumi.

“Three Daughters of Eve” takes place one evening in Istanbul in 2016. Peri, one of the daughters from the title, is on her way to a fancy party when a thief snatches her purse out of the back seat of her car which is stalled in traffic. She parks the car and chases him through back alleys. As she fights him for her purse, an old photo falls to the ground. It portrays three young women and their university professor. This photo jars her mind, takes her back to her time at Oxford University when she was a student there in 2000-2002, her childhood in Istanbul in the 1980s and 90s, and her life. She thinks back to her life with her two friends, Shirin, an adventurous Iranian young woman, and Mona, a devout Egyptian Muslim who word a headscarf out of choice. And then there is the famous professor Azur, whose class on God either makes students hate or love him and the scandal that caused Peri to return to Istanbul.

Until her daughter, who was in the car and eventually chases her mother down in the alley, sees the photo, no one, except her husband, seems to have known Peri even went to Oxford. Her daughter mentions it at the party while everyone is arguing about East and West and politics and who has the most money and how they acquired it. Peri tries to deflect questions, changes the subject, and keeps remembering her past: her parents, a father quite irreligious, her mother a devout Muslim, their endless arguments and hostility, her brothers, her childhood and her stint at Oxford.

Through the story of Peri’s life, this novel explores personal identity, East-West history and politics, the meaning of marriage and friendship.

Book 29 for 2024: “The Covenant of Water”, Abraham Verghese

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I waited for more than a year to get this book via the library. It stayed on the best seller lists for months and months and has been translated into more than twenty languages. It is the saga of one family from 1900 to 1977. The setting is the Kerala area of India (I have been to India but not this area). It is unique compared to much of India in that Christians, Muslims, and Hindus live in relative peace with each other. Unlike the more arid parts of India, this is a place dominated by water which is a major theme in the book. Several of the main characters in the book suffer from an inherited Condition, as they refer to it. In every generation, at least one person dies from drowning.

The book begins with a 12 year old girl being married off to a 40 some year old widower. She has to travel far from her family via water. He is kind and patient but unlike her, who loves the water, he will travel many extra miles to avoid even traveling by water. He is terrified of water because he has the Condition. Eventually, she becomes the family matriarch, Big Ammachi. This is her story and the story of her descendants, the Christian community in Kerala, and the fate of one British man who remained in India after independence. It is also the story of the progress of medicine (Big Ammachi’s granddaughter is determined to become a doctor and find what causes the Condition) and how one family experiences many hardships to further future generations.

The author, Vice Chair of the Department of Medicine at Stanford, details this fictional family’s history for several generations in 715 pages. It sounds daunting but I kept reading because I wanted to know what happens to all the people. At the same time, I found this to be one of the saddest books I have ever read. Due to the Condition and leprosy, for which there was no cure at the time, many people’s lives are horrendously affected. I did learn a lot about medicine and medical advances, how leprosy destroyed lives, Kerala and, much to my amazement, that many Christians in Kerala continued to follow the Hindu caste system.

Book 28 for 2024: “Gun Island”, Amitav Ghosh

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A tale based on a Bengali legend about a merchant called the Gun Merchant, Bonduki Sadagar, this novel not only takes place in the mangrove swamps of the Sundarbans but also in Venice. It has nothing to do with guns but demonstrates how differences in language use among languages and translations can lead to total mistranslation. The narrator is an older, male, Bengali, rare book dealer who grew up in Kolkata but now lives in Brooklyn most of the year and goes back “home” occasionally. When he meets a distant relative by chance at a party, he finds himself enmeshed in the Gun Merchant tale and finds himself in search of a remote shrine where a king cobra lives. His adventure leads him to meet two young men and reconnect with an old friend, an Italian woman who is a famous historian.

What fascinated me most about this novel was learning all about the immense number of historical connections between the Bengali part of India and Venice especially related to trade and persons of Jewish descent. It is also filled with lessons in relationships among languages and history. For example, I learned the origin of the word ghetto. During the 17th century a part of Venice, Getto, was where their large and prosperous Jewish population was forced to live, Venice being one of few European cities where Jews were safe. Thus the word designating a part of the city became the word ghetto.

It is also a story about the risks and dangers of immigrants trying to get to Europe. I learned many Bengalis, mostly from Bangladesh, live in Venice and the numerous historical connections between the Bengali speaking areas of the world and Venice.

Book 27 for 2024: “The New Naturals”, Gabriel Bump

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Rio, a young Black woman, and her husband, Gibraltar, academics living in Boston, become concerned and disillusioned with their current lives. She finds an abandoned restaurant on top of a hill in western Massachusetts. Heartbroken after the death of her newborn, she is determined to create a safe, new, underground society beneath the restaurant. She finds a benefactor and her dream begins to take place. Via word of mouth, others hear about this safe place for the “lost” and disillusioned and head there. These include two homeless men from Chicago, a successful, young journalist, and a former soccer player.

Can such a society work? What happens if they run out of money? Regardless, can the care individuals have for each other save them?

Note: Depending on what kind of novels you prefer, this may or may not be a book for you. Several of the characters have serious mental issues, some think it is ok to resort to violence to save what they believe in and find ways to justify their actions, some seem very, very “lost”.

An Abecedarian Poem for the Fourth of July

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As many celebrate this day

because they see it as a joyous

cry in praise of the

day the United States declared

emancipation from English tyranny,

free to be its own country, self

governed, no longer ruled by kings,

humans, Black, enslaved,

indigenous, find celebration difficult.

Jefferson, in The Declaration of Independence,

knowingly called Native People

lacking in worth,

“merciless Indian Savages,”

never considering the contradictions, the

overt irony when compared to his view that

people are created equal.

Qualified, white male landowners, the

rich, voted, prospered.

Slaves, counted as only 2/3 a person, were

told to obey, work til death, be Christian.

Until all, regardless of race, gender, religion, are

valued as worthy humans, are free to prosper, can

walk proud throughout the United States,

xenophobia will destroy our founding ideals.

Yearn for, work toward, equity, kindness, be

zealous in our quest for a better country.

Book 18 for 2024: “Quiet Street”, Nick McDonell

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Want to know how the top 1 percent, the super wealthy live and control nearly everything in the US? Read this book. In a mere 117 pages, McDonell explains his own life and that of fellow 1 percenters. He details his early life, the private school he attended, the family connections, summers taking sailing lessons in the Hamptons, and vacations using private jets to places like the Galapagos Islands. At 18, he was able to get his first novel published in part because of his family connections to a famous publisher. Eventually, he left this life behind to become a foreign correspondent in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In this book he details how the super wealthy hoard wealth, pass it from one generation to another, and how outsiders, the poor and those not white, are kept out. Here are a few quotes from the book:

“I began to see how, in the United States of America and elsewhere, success almost always, and predominantly, depends upon wealth–and frequently comes at the expense of the less wealthy.”

“We in the one percent like to believe in meritocracy, even fairness.” At this point he lists several of famous people who rose to wealth and power from poorer circumstance and explains how this is used to make the “one percenters feel good, they distract from the possibility of a more humane distribution of wealth.”

Why do the one percenters behave as they often do? He interviews several whom he knows through his private school connections. “The fear they share was loss of wealth. Without ever saying so, they were very much afraid of losing their country houses, the barn converted for their kids sleepovers, the space for the grand piano, the green houses, pied-a-terre where their mother-in-law stayed without interfering in everyone’s business, the airport lounge that allowed them to enjoy pleasures among their own, in quiet. They were afraid of supermarket processed cheese, preferred organic stuff which they believed would keep them alive longer….they were afraid of losing their Prada bags…the cashmere….They feared losing wealth not for its own sake but because it was justified, in their own minds, by intelligence, hard work, determination—that is by character.” They truly seem to believe they are smarter and harder working than other people.

Book 15 for 2024: “The Elegance of the Hedgehog”, Muriel Barbery

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Before reading this book, I thought of French society as relatively egalitarian. Apparently, it is not if this book mirrors reality. One main character Renee, 54, lives and works as a concierge in a high class building containing eight, large, luxury apartments which the residents own. As she tells her story, she notes that this is her 27th year at this job. She describes herself as “short, ugly, plump”. She rarely says anything nice about herself or any of the residents. She notes she is uneducated, insignificant. She has one friend, Manuela, a cleaning woman originally from Portugal. Renee thinks it is her duty, her lot in life, to pretend to be something she is really not, a person totally lacking in intellectual and artistic acumen. She runs the television to make the residents think she watches mindless melodramas when she is actually reading Tolstoy as well as all sorts of literature and Marx, history, well every genre. After all, her cat is named Leo for a reason. She goes to art galleries, listens to all sorts of classical music, is basically an intellectual in the true meaning of the word, but works very hard to hide this, because she thinks she must stick to her station in life as she sees it. This works until one resident dies and a wealthy Japanese man buys the deceased man’s apartment. Both he, who notes her cat is named Leo, and a young girl, the other main character who lives in one of the apartments and plans to commit suicide and set their apartment on fire, suspect Renee is not as she appears to be. I do not want to give it all away, but this is a book with many life lessons, including that adage about not judging a book by its cover.

Ovid

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This is poem two for National Poetry Month. A friend wrote a poem following the prompt to write a poem about a book the writer has not read for a long time. She wrote about The Scarlet Letter. My poem is about the book, An Imaginary Life.

The Roman Emperor Augustus saw Ovid’s poetry as subversive,

a power threat. He exiled Ovid to a remote corner of the Empire,

somewhere over by the Black Sea, the Carpathian Mountains,

among the destitute, the superstitious, people who did even know

how to read or write. They believed in witches, feared ghosts, saw

evil in everything and everyone different. Different equaled

death.

Paid to host Ovid, the village leader teaches him to ride horses

bareback, hunt, become stronger. Ovid transforms from a weak

revolutionary who hates this place to one who sees the barren

beauty, wanders in the forests, plants a wildflower garden,

survives.

While hunting, they see barefoot tracks in snow, tracks

of a feral child, a boy. Ovid fears for him, finds him,

rescues him. An accident occurs. The villagers blame

the boy, want to kill him. He and Ovid escape,

wander far into the northern wilds, into

infinity.