• How to Make a Slave by Jerald Walker **** (of 4)

    October 7, 2023

    Jerald Walker is a Black professor at a prestigious Boston college. He lives in an overwhelmingly upscale Boston-adjacent community, and on the surface would appear to have put considerable distance between his childhood days in the ghettos of Chicago and the present day. Yet, as he chronicles his daily experience as the one person who can be identified from a distance as “other” in an otherwise liberal setting, not all is well.

    Walker’s essays are short, often funny, and almost always leave you with an underlying feeling of anxiety. When Walker’s child is accused of being “stinky” in elementary school, Walker wonders if the accusation borne of home-taught racism, and does he already need to explain to his son what he is about to experience, or just a schoolyard taunt? When Walker shops at his neighborhood Whole Foods, white women instinctively seal up their purses, pull them from their shopping carts, and draw them close to their bodies. When his child suffers a seizure, and then another, and he sits in a panic in the ER for an eternity, while others appear to be treated with greater speed, is it because his is the only Black family waiting, because by rules of triage, there really isn’t much to worry about?

    This book was nominated for the National Book Award for good reason. The author makes us tighten up our shoulders with every page and we have to recognize that the fear he has engendered in us, accompanies him all the time.

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  • The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw *** (of 4)

    July 12, 2022

    A series of loosely connected short stories about the inner thoughts and external actions of younger Black women whose wants and desires are not so chaste and confined as their gray-haired elders whose lives it seems have always been defined by an all-purpose white Jesus of their community church. Younger Black women have sexual desires, sometimes for men and sometimes for women. They have insecurities and therapists. Their relationships with mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and aunties, are simultaneously fraught with jangling rage, but also the bedrock upon which they stand and have stood generation after generation. Black Women’s Lives Matter, only prayer to Jesus is no longer sufficient as these women fight their way forward.

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  • Hogs Wild: Selected Reporting by Ian Frazier *** (of 4)

    October 20, 2016

    hogswild_cvr_112015.inddMany of the essays, interviews, and reports collected here were first published in the New Yorker, but not one of them is less interesting reading a second time.  The stories range from a page to more than thirty and cover such disparate topics as the most dangerous bus route in New York City, seal-spotting, the guys that invented compostable packaging made from fungi, teaching the homeless to be better writers, the origins of one of Bob Dylan’s earliest and most important songs, and how Asian Carp are spreading throughout America’s heartland.  Who knew there were so many interesting things to learn about?  What makes each essay so interesting, of course, is not the topic, but Frazier’s innate ability to spin simile and metaphor.  Park benches have snow pulled up to their knees and a meteorite that crashed through a roof in Monmouth, New Jersey, “was dull brownish-silver and shaped sort of like a small croissant.”  Reading every story back-to-back can be wearing.  Better, perhaps, to treat this collection like a box of fine chocolates.

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  • What we Talk about when we Talk about Anne Frank *** (of 4) by Nathan Englander

    July 13, 2016

    anne frankEight short stories.  All of them sad.  Englander pitches his stories to test the limits of love in binding marriages, ageless friendships, families, and neighbors.  Two matriarchs of Israel’s settler movement are asked if they can continue to stand by one another as personal tragedies and then national tragedies overtake them.  Childhood friends from yeshiva are reunited after one has become an ultra-orthodox Israeli and the other the mother of a secular son in Florida.  Now both married they sit with their husbands and prod one another: for whom would they would sacrifice themselves to save another’s life?  Holocaust survivors pass a lifetime in an Israeli shuk acting upon, but not speaking of the unspeakable.  Englander’s stories make us think about our own boundaries and sometimes about what in the world he is up to when, for example, he places a protagonist in a peep show staring first at his Rabbi and then at his mother.  The author’s directive is that relationships are untrustworthy.

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  • Redeployment by Phil Klay *** (of 4)

    April 8, 2016

    Redeployment-673x1024Phil Klay’s short stories about Marine Corps life in Iraq and after Iraq begin so realistically that I had to check to confirm I was reading fiction.  The accumulated mosaic combines the experiences of grunts, commanders, American snipers, wounded veterans, supply men, post-war rebuilders, chaplains, and kids who found themselves fighting Hajis before they were even old enough to legally drink beer.  Notably absent are women and people of color who combined probably make up the majority, or nearly so, of our army.  While some stories are naturally better than others, the net effect is not so much the hackneyed maxim that war is hell, but rather this war created by George Bush and incompetently prosecuted by his post-war advisors was an ineptitude of epic proportions.  No character in this book seems fully confident of who the enemy is or for what logic they are fighting.  Winner of the National Book Award.

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  • The UnAmericans by Molly Antopol **** (of 4)

    November 26, 2014

    unamericansEight short stories about young and old Jews in America and in Israel and every character elicits your sympathy.  Antopol starts her stories in the middle of a discussion you might have just dropped in upon and within moments you are riveted by people so real, angst so visceral, and tension so necessary to resolve it is at once remarkable it is only a story that you are reading and even more exceptional that it is a short story at that.  In one, a pair of brothers living in Israel must come to terms with the fact that the younger, less talented, and less capable has saved the life of the older, more handsome, and more successful-in-every-way brother.  In another, a B-grade actor is released from a year in jail after getting caught up with communist actors and directors during the McCarthy era.  A young Israeli, in a third story, is, forced home to live with her parents when her overseas career as a journalist burns out but falls in lust with a slightly older widower who has a troubled teenage daughter.  How would you balance an unexpected love affair, fizzled career hopes, your parents, and a teenager living her despairing father and without her mother?  Neither the plotlines, nor the list of protagonists does justice to this series of stories that all seem to revolve about a single aphorism.  “Be careful what you wish for.”  A must read of a young author’s first book — Antopol is in her early 30s.

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  • You Can Date Boys When You’re Forty by Dave Barry *** (of 4)

    May 9, 2014

    fortyA series of slightly augmented columns from Barry’s newspaper gig smashed together in a very funny book.  Barry muses on grammar, sex, grammar and sex, Justin Bieber, air travel, what women think about (see grammar), and what men think about (see sex).  Interestingly, there is one long piece in the book.  Barry describes his 10-day synagogue tour to the Holy Land.  Turns out visiting Israel was sufficiently moving that there wasn’t much to laugh about.  I forgive him and so do God and the Israelis.

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  • This is the Story of a Happy Marriage ** (of 4) by Ann Patchett

    January 4, 2014

    marriageThis is a collection of Patchett’s non-fiction essays, all previously published.  Well-written, autobiographical, unresearched, and self-aggrandizing.  Patchett is not only a strong writer, but she knows it and insists that you never forget it.  The second essay of the book, the longest, too, is advice to wanna-be writers.  Patchett’s bottom line is that to succeed as an author you must be really good, and by strong implication, as good as she is.  Not much encouragement there.  She has an essay about leaving her first husband and another about agreeing to take back her second husband.  It takes courage, I’m sure, to expose your marital difficulties in print, but given how reliably Patchett insists she is faultless, it is somehow understandable why her marriages have been problematic and less than comprehensible how she chose the title of her book.

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  • Natasha and Other Stories by David Bezmozgis **** (of 4)

    June 22, 2010

    This short collection of short stories is a wonderful piece of honey cake with a glass of tea. A Jewish Russian immigrant to Toronto describes the transition he makes with his parents and uncle and aunt as they climb from helpless newcomers to weary acceptance of life in the new world, without ever losing the cultural imprinting that Russia plants within its citizenry. The book is full of smiles of recognition, truthful while remaining fictional–but who knows where autobiography is replaced by a little relish — and I think quite accessible even to people who neither know Russians or Jews. In fact, it’s probably a wonderful introduction to both. The book is short, the stories chronological, the characters continue to grow from one to the next, yet it’s not quite a novel with contiguous chapters. July 2005.

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