FOR BLACK GIRLS LIKE ME (audiobook) by Mariama J. Lockington

 

Published by Listening Library in 2019.
Read by Imani Parks.
Duration: 6 hours, 35 minutes.
Unabridged.

Winner of more than 15 awards, including "A 2020 ALA Notable Middle-Grade Novel" and "A Bank Street Best Book of the Year"

Makeda and her family are moving from Maryland to New Mexico. Her father got a position in a symphony in New Mexico. Her mother doesn't have a job right now, but she used to tour the world playing the violin before she had a family.

The author, Mariama J. Lockington

Makeda is loved by her mother, her father and her older sister, but she is different. They are white and she is black. Her family never makes her doubt their love, but strangers make her keenly aware of the differences when they ask where her parents are in stores or when they stare at her getting out of the car with the rest of the family until they finally figure out their relationship with one another. The older she gets, the more she wonders about her own roots.

While the family tries to set down roots in New Mexico, Makeda is struggling. She left her best friend behind in Maryland - a girl with a similar background. She has failed to make new friends in New Mexico - twice falling victim to the age old story of being the new girl that everyone bands up against because they feel she is an interloper.

Makeda wants her differences to be recognized and appreciated for what they are, not necessarily pushed to the side for the sake of family unity. For example, there is an extended discussion about Makeda going to get her hair done by a beautician that specializes in African American hair. The mother sees this as a rejection of her efforts as a mother. Makeda sees her mother's reaction as a denial of her.

If you read this book, you should be aware that the mother has a serious case of bipolar disorder. When Makeda's father goes on an international tour with the orchestra, it gets worse. 

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Makeda's mother becomes more and more erratic as the book goes along, careening back and forth between crippling depression that won't let her get out of bed to a manic state that builds to a fever until she finally tries to kill herself when her daughters are out of the home.

The story ends up with the mother getting appropriate treatment and the family dealing with , but I know that some families and some readers have a special sensitivity to depictions of suicide. 

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My review:

I don't normally read YA novels aimed at middle school girls, but I decided to read this one when I found an article about how the Attorney General of Oklahoma was looking into a list of 51 books that were submitted to his office for being "pornographic" by groups like Moms for Liberty.

I found nothing remotely pornographic in this book. Moms for Liberty is pretty active in referring books to be banned at schools with racial content out of critical race theory concerns (see their linked articles on their website here and here). For example, last month I reviewed this book about the little girl that desegregated schools in New Orleans - Ruby Bridges. Moms for Liberty had complained about it in Tennessee.

This book was good, but I am not the target audience. For example, as a 53 year old adult, I found the father to be frustrating because he left an obviously mentally ill woman alone to take care of the family while he went on an extended, multiple week work trip to play with his orchestra. Clearly, she was not up to this task. However, most kids probably wouldn't even see that angle to the story.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: For Black Girls Like Me by Mariama Lockington.

HERNÁN CORTÉS: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History

Published by Hourly History in 2020.

I am an avid reader of history, but I have areas of weakness that I am perfectly willing to shore up a bit, but I don't want to invest a ton of time. I want to know a bit more, not become an expert. The history of the Spanish conquest of the New World is just one of those areas for me. I know more than most people, but I can see the glaringly empty areas of my own ignorance.

Cortés is, of course, the Spanish conquistador that pretty much invented the idea of being a Spanish conquistador. Conquistador means "conqueror" in Spanish and Cortés pretty much perfected the concept when he conquered the Aztec Empire from 1519-1521.

I am not going to attempt a defense of Cortés' motives or techniques, but it was literally one of the most amazing conquests in history. 

What this history does well is give a brief synopsis of the conquests in a straight narrative history. There's not a lot of analysis and certainly not much information on the native Mexican groups - not even the Aztecs themselves. 

This is exactly the sort of biography that someone who hates history might pick to read because it is not an intimidating length and it is not written in highfalutin language. 

There is nothing in this biography that is inaccurate, just a matter of what the Hourly History people decided to highlight and emphasize.

I rate this kindle book 3 stars out of 5. Not bad, for what it is. Nowhere near a complete biography, but a solid place to start. This book can be found on Amazon.com here:  HERNÁN CORTÉS: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History.

BLIND JUSTICE (Blake Justice Series Book 1)(kindle) by Mark Anthony Taylor

Published by Mount Shasta
Publishing (2nd edition) in 2021.

Blake Justice is a detective in the Avon Police Department. Avon is a suburb on the west side of Indianapolis. 

Blake is a massive physical specimen of muscle and no-nonsense serious intentions. He always wears his bullet-proof vest (even in church) and never goes anywhere without two pistols (once again, even in church). 

Detective Justice is hunting down a group of thieves that are robbing local businesses. He is also on the lookout for a big-time drug dealer who is said to be moving operations into Avon. Meanwhile, Detective Justice has a new partner...

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I bought this book because I saw an ad on Facebook. I live very close to Avon and am in Avon quite often and I am very familiar with the town and when I saw that the book was set in Avon I spent 99 cents and bought it. You can't go wrong at that price, can you?

Turns out that you can go wrong with this book no matter the price.

Some of the problems:

1) I was more than 10% of the way into this book before I decided that it was probably not a parody book. The problem is, the book feels like it is trying to be serious, but everything about the book screams parody.

2) No matter what connections bad guys have, they are not released from custody with no consequences if they fire pistols at police officers during a police chase and leave bullet holes all over the interior of the car.

3) Avon is a town of 18,000 residents. The geographic area that the author describes includes most of the western half of Indianapolis, a city of nearly 1,000,000. I'm okay with exaggerating, but this is ridiculous. 

4) Blake Justice has a personal armory in the trunk of his car, including multiple Kevlar vests, multiple pistols and hand grenades! I am talking real hand grenades, not the flash-bang ones. And, he has them in the trunk because he actually intends to use them as a police officer. You can see why I wasn't sure if it was a parody or not.

A Desert Eagle

5) Blake Justice's partner keeps calling the pistols that Justice keeps in the trunk of his car Dessert Eagles. They are actually Desert Eagles - one of the world's heaviest and most powerful handguns. I can't tell if it was a failed attempt at humor or a series of typos.

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The action scenes were well-written and the final fight scene is pretty good, but everything else is over the top and a parody, even if it wasn't intended to be.

I rate this e-book 2 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: BLIND JUSTICE (Blake Justice Series Book 1) by Mark Anthony Taylor.

HOW to HIDE an EMPIRE: A HISTORY of the GREATER UNITED STATES (audiobook) by Daniel Immerwahr

 

Published in 2019 by Recorded Books.
Read by Luis Moreno.
Duration: 17 hours, 25 minutes.
Unabridged.

If I asked you to think of a map of the United States you would almost certainly imagine the contiguous 48 states and maybe imagine the little inset maps of Alaska and Hawaii. 

But, you probably would not imagine other areas like American Samoa being a part of that map. How about Guam or the U.S. Virgin Islands even though the people who live there are American citizens? How about Puerto Rico? Puerto Ricans are citizens and Puerto Rico has a population bigger than at least 15 states.

How to Hide an Empire is about how America has maintained an empire of sorts from the very beginning. At first, it was by continually moving out of the official states into Indian territory, Mexico, Spanish territory and English territory. The United States took several strategic "guano" islands that were not claimed by anyone in the late 1800s. The United States has held a traditional empire since the Spanish-American War in 1898 when it took the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico and Cuba. It went on the acquire other properties by trading and conquering during the World Wars (the World War II section of this book is excellent).

Nowadays, the United States maintains a hybrid empire. It has kept some territories and turned others into states (Hawaii and Alaska) but it has also tried something new. 

The United States seems to have learned a lesson with its experience in the Philippines. The United States spent a lot of time, treasure and blood pacifying the Philippines only to have it become a liability during World War II - the Japanese attacked it within hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The U.S. quickly granted the Philippines its independence and changed its "business model".

Rather than conquer and hold other countries, the United States has maintained an immense series of bases and installations across the world. The most famous is probably Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, but others include Ramstein Air Base in Germany with 53,000 people.

On the other end of the spectrum there are also tiny little properties that house radio listening stations or broadcasting stations.   According to this article by the Libertarian think tank the Cato Institute, the United States has about 750 foreign military installations around the world -  three times as many installations as all other countries combined. Note the article is an opinion piece and the Cato Institute is generally of the opinion that the U.S. military should pull back. They always write with a political point in mind, but I don't usually find the Cato Institute to be untruthful.

This was an interesting look at American history. Some of it is shameful - such as the medical experimentation that has done on unsuspecting Puerto Ricans. Some of it is amazing - such as the immense supply chain that the U.S. used to supply Chinese forces and help keep the Japanese bogged down in China throughout the war. The supply line flew through 4 continents, over two oceans, the world's largest desert and over the world's tallest mountain range. It supplied the model for the base system the United States uses now. 

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: HOW to HIDE an EMPIRE: A HISTORY of the GREATER UNITED STATES by Daniel Immerwahr. 

INSURGENCY: HOW REPUBLICANS LOST THEIR PARTY and GOT EVERYTHING THEY EVER WANTED (audiobook) by Jeremy W. Peters

 

Published in February of 2022 by Random House Publishing.
Read by the author, Jeremy W. Peters.
Duration: 13 hours, 46 minutes.
Unabridged.

Sorry that this will be a herky-jerky post. It deserves a better one, but that would have to be a much longer post, perhaps 3 or 4 times longer. That would be so lengthy that no one would bother to read it.

Peters' book details how the GOP went from the party of Eisenhower and Reagan to the party of MAGA and Trump.

The old GOP advocated Free Trade, welcomed immigrants, valued the NATO alliance and wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade. The MAGA party flirts with the idea of leaving NATO, denounces Free Trade agreements, openly despises illegal immigrants and openly discusses the idea that all immigrants (legal and illegal) are being brought into the U.S. to replace white people with more compliant people of color. As Tucker Carlson, the number one cable news voice of the MAGA movement, stated in April 2021, "the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate — the voters now casting ballots — with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World." This view was applauded by David Duke, a former leader of the KKK. Carlson has re-stated those comments many times since.

What they have in common is the desire to overturn Roe v. Wade. Peters contends that the party that Reagan built morphed into something unrecognizable because of that one goal (the "everything they ever wanted" in the title). 

Peters looks at the political threads that began the movement and starts with the John Birch Society - a group that saw everything as a plot advanced by International Communism. The Birchers were denounced by mainstream Conservatives like William F. Buckley as being crackpots who  built the intellectual arguments used by Reagan to become president. Reagan used to be the standard all Conservatives were judged by. Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh used to refer to him as Ronaldus Magnus as a sign of his stature in the party. He was uncriticizable, much like FDR was to Democrats in the post-WWII years. 

The MAGA movement never criticizes Reagan, but it undoes most everything Reagan stood for. Ironically, Rush received a Presidential Medal of Freedom from the man who did more to undermine more of Reagan's foreign policy and free trade policies than any other president.

Peters follows those John Birch threads to Patrick Buchanan and his multiple failed attempts to run for president in the late 20th and early 21st centuries and finds another man who also ran and flirted with running at the same time, often saying similar things - Donald J. Trump.

Peters identifies the nomination of Sarah Palin as the Vice Presidential candidate in 2008 and the rise of alternate internet-based media like InfoWars and Breitbart along with social media and its emphasis on conspiracy (QAnon, Great Replacement, 5G towers spreading Covid-19, etc.) as major contributors to the MAGA movement.

This was a fascinating audiobook and read very well by the author. The more the Bircher tendencies showed up in the GOP and it became the party dominated by conspiracy theories, the more I wanted out.  After being a consistent GOP voter since 1996, I ran away and became politically homeless in 2016. (note: the Dems have their own set of conspiracy theories, but they don't tend to dominate the entirety of their political discussions as MAGA's conspiracy theories dominate the GOP) .

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. Highly recommended. This book can be found on Amazon.com here: INSURGENCY: HOW REPUBLICANS LOST THEIR PARTY and GOT EVERYTHING THEY EVER WANTED by Jeremy W. Peters.

RUBY BRIDGES GOES to SCHOOL: MY TRUE STORY by Ruby Bridges

 

Originally published in 2009.

In 1960, a six year old little girl named Ruby Bridges was to be the first African-American student to integrate an elementary school in Louisiana. To say it did not go well would be an understatement.

Parents pulled their children out. So many pulled their children out that Ruby was in a class by herself at first. There were so screaming, protesting mobs of parents. There were threats of violence. It was so bad that federal marshals were sent in to ensure her safety and to ensure that the desegregation order was enforced.

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This book was written by Ruby Bridges and is published by Scholastic as a Level 2 early reader. That is pretty early for a student to read about this topic - Ruby Bridges was the same age as the children who would be reading this book.

I normally don't review books for little children, but I decided to review this one when I saw that a group called Moms for Liberty called for it to be removed from a a school system in Tennessee. They were worried about its emphasis on racial strife. To that I would say two things: 

1) Based on my experiences as a teacher, (more than 20 years in urban schools) I am of the opinion that a great majority of African-American students are already aware of the racial divisions in this country - maybe the white students should be more aware as well. 

2) These events were not that long ago. Ruby Bridges was born in 1954. She is younger than my parents by roughly a decade. My youngest daughter (high school age) is well aware of Ruby Bridges thanks to the movie and a permanent exhibit at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis. It blew her mind to find out Ruby Bridges is younger than her grandparents. 

So, what do I think?

This is a great book. It shows the difficulties she faced but ends on a positive note (the Moms for Liberty disagree, but I disagree with them on a lot of things, so what's new). 

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: RUBY BRIDGES GOES to SCHOOL: MY TRUE STORY by Ruby Bridges

SIRENS of TITAN by Kurt Vonnegut

 

Originally published in 1959.
Finalist for the 1960 Hugo Award.

The Sirens of Titan is the second published novel by Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007). I decided to do a systematic reading of Vonnegut's books and I started with this one. Why did I start with his second bookbecause it mentioned the fictional planet of Tralfamadore and I know that Tralfamadore figures into several other Vonnegut books later on.

I must admit that I am a huge fan of Vonnegut's essay collections, but I have found some of his books to be...a bit too chaotic. That's funny, because I love that about his essays.

This book features a couple of very rich men. One had become a space explorer because of a phenomenon called the chrono-synclastic infundibulum that exists in a spiral in the solar system. Earth governments have stopped sending people on exploration missions because they could just disappear. Winston Niles Rumfoord built a private, luxury space ship and he and his dog headed directly for the chrono-synclastic infundibulum and disappeared.

Rumfoord now reappears on Earth every 59 days for one hour. On one of those days, he requested to meet the world's richest man - Malachi Constant because he has a message for him. What follows is a series of predictions that all come true.

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This book is full of all sorts of themes, including the ideas that organized religion is bunk, no one is really totally in control of their lives and God does not intervene in our lives which are simply the product of random chance. 

A mural of Kurt Vonnegut in his hometown -
Indianapolis, Indiana. Photo by DWD.

The beginning of this book and the ending were interesting to me. The whole middle part about the Martian invasion and a detour to Mercury was tedious for me. 

In one of his essays, Vonnegut gave an A-F grade to a bunch of his novels. He gave Sirens of Titan an A. I am going to disagree and give it 3 stars out of 5 - my equivalent of a C.  

Quotes I liked:

"...a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."

"Indianapolis, Indiana...is the first place in the United States of America where a white man was hanged for the murder of an Indian. The kind of people who'll hang a white man for murdering an Indian...that's the kind of people for me." (Note: this is pretty much true - it happened near a suburb of Indianapolis - Anderson)

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: THE SIRENS of TITAN by Kurt Vonnegut.