Book Review: Things That Make White People Uncomfortable by Michael Bennett and Dave Zirin

Talk about provocative titles, right?  I picked this book up in January when attending Winter Institute, an independent booksellers convention, in Memphis, TN. There’s a magical place there called The Galley Room, where tables groan under the stacks of books piled thereon. All the booksellers have to do is wander around the room and help themselves to complimentary copies of anything that looks good. Like many readers and booksellers, I actively try to diversify my reading (which for me also means intentionally choosing some non-fiction sometimes amidst the literary fiction that comprises my main reading interest AND making sure that I read works from small publishers), so this book ticked all the boxes.

It turns out that Michael Bennett is an important player in the NFL, a fact that no doubt many readers would know, but which took me completely by surprise.  I have since asked myself whether I would have picked this up to read if I had known that, as I have zero interest in footfall, despite having grown up in Mississippi, where football is less a sport and more a religion. As of my reading of this book, he was a player for the Seattle Seahawks, but as of this writing, he was traded to the Philadelphia Eagles.

At any rate, I’m glad I picked this book up to read because first of all, Michael Bennett is talking about things that make white people uncomfortable, and second of all, he’s doing it in a very accessible and conversational tone.

If you know football, then you quite likely know some of the things that Bennett has been involved with, starting with the support of Colin Kaepernick and his kneeling during the national anthem, but moving beyond that to his participation in the Black Lives Matter movement.  So far, so awesome.  But what I really loved about this book was Bennett’s passion for intersectionality and the many ways he’s become involved with his community and speaking out against (or in some cases, FOR) various things: the institutionalized racism of the NFL and the NCAA, the importance of providing affordable and wholesome foods in the poorest urban centers, the marginality of women, people of color, and LGBTQ people in every aspect of our society -- really, the list goes on.

In one case, Bennett had been invited to Israel to play an All-Stars exhibition game, which he was really excited about because he loves to travel and meet new people. But not long before departure, he took a closer look at the itinerary and realized that it was a very sheltered trip, he would not be allowed to visit Palestine, and that the trip was not just a goodwill trip, but a political one. He canceled, voiced his reasons publicly, and spent months researching Israel and Palestine, and then booked his own trip there.

On the subject of becoming an activist: “It’s so much easier to talk shit than to do shit, because once you are out there representing what you believe, people see the real you. Most everybody in the world wears a mask, and very rarely do people unveil who they really are...So I’m going to be judged by strangers on the core of who I am, and yes, that makes me vulnerable and it can even feel terrifying. Nobody wants to lose his job like Kaepernick...but if the price of employment is silence, I just can’t do it anymore.”

On the subject of politics and personal activism: “As much as I was into Bernie, I also believe that just electing someone and expecting them to make real change happen for us is a dead end. I believe in intersectionality because Bernie Sanders -- or anyone else - isn’t going to end racism or bring resources into underserved communities. We are going to need to connect with each other to bring about the shifts we need. I hope we have more political candidates who express the values Bernie was talking about, but we still have to do the work.”

On becoming woke to gender discrimination: “Knowing that sexism and gender violence and employment discrimination are going to be real obstacles in their [his daughters’] lives makes me want to fight for girls and women with all my heart.  I wish it didn’t take having daughters for men [and me] to realize that this is their struggle, too. It should be enough that we are all human and we should want equality. But the reality is we live in a world where women -- especially Black women -- aren’t valued, and that often means that until we are looking at the world through our daughters’ eyes, we just don’t get it like we should.”

Amen to all of that.  Whatever Michael Bennett has next in store, I look forward to it.  It’s not every day that somebody can get me to consider football, really consider it, and I’ll be the first reader in line for his next book.

Things That Make White People Uncomfortable will be published by Haymarket Books on April 3.  Go out and get yourself a copy to read, why don’t you? 

Book Review: Leaving Before the Rains Come

I'm not sure why I put off reading Alexandra Fuller's newest book, Leaving Before the Rains Come. I had read two of her previous books, one of which I even loved, but the subject matter of this book -- a woman discovering that she and her husband are not a good fit after all -- was not of much interest.  More the fool, me.

It's true, though.  On the surface, there's not much to separate Fuller's story from the hundreds, or even thousands, of memoirs out there that explore marital dissatisfaction and spousal incompatibility, even with the additional level of angst brought on by the recession/depression that hit American in 2008 and from which we're still recovering. Luckily for the reader, though, Fuller is a master of humanity and a helluva writer.

Fuller grew up in Zimbabwe and Zambia, child to parents of hardy English and Scottish stock, and had the great good fortune (some might say misfortune) of being raised in a larger than life family.  Many writers grow up in big, raucous families, but the Fuller family makes every other family I've encountered through literature seem tame by comparison. They've survived civil wars and famines, lost their homes and jobs many times, and even have had to endure the loss of some of their children.  Venturing to the grocery store involves 8+ hour roundtrips on dangerous roads. The surviving children are home schooled, sort of, but that means finding ways to stay out of doors all day, wandering around the bush. Malaria was a fact of life, drinking started early in the day and went on late, and the worst sin anybody could commit at the dinner table was to be boring.

In other words, the Fuller family is of the kind that is so admirable and interesting to read about but perhaps less comfortable to actually live with.  Unconventional, larger-than-life, fearless, fierce, careless, and  undaunted.

So really, it comes as no surprise to the reader that Fuller falls for Charlie almost as soon as she meets him.  An American in Zambia, he can play polo, face down wild elephants, and paddle down  Class V rapids without apparent effort or concern, but he also is easy going and able to take in the ramshackle Zambian setting with aplomb. Mistaking his ease with the country and her family as an anchor to stabilize herself, Alexandra marries him quickly.

That's the set up.  The second half of the book is the mire of that marriage, now that the couple have moved with their young children to the US. Neither spouse is really what the other had imagined, and Fuller does not spare herself the same scrutiny that she applies to husband when examining how and where things went wrong.  Her answers keep circling back to her family, her upbringing, and her leaving the land she loved.

Not especially earth-shattering, or at least not to the reader.  The dissolution of a marriage is a sad thing, but it is not an extraordinary one.  But as I said above, it's Fuller's insights and her knack for piecing together words in beautiful and surprising ways that sets this book apart. Here are a few excerpts:

On being neither African nor European: "I was accidentally British, incidentally European -- a coincidence of so many couplings. But I was deliberately southern African. Not in a good or easy way. There is no getting around the fact that there had been so much awful violence to get me here; my people had engaged in such terrible acts of denial and oppression; I so obviously did not look African; and yet here I still was. That seemed to me to prove a point. Someone had planted me in this soil and I had taken fierce hold. And although I had no illusions -- this land wasn't mine to inherit, none of it belonged to me -- I couldn't help knowing that I belonged to it...The fact that I felt more at home in southern Africa than I did anywhere else on earth, and that I missed the countries of my youth with a physical ache, didn't make me a legitimate citizen of Zimbabwe or Zambia any more than an amputee's cruel sensation of a missing limb renders them whole again."

On watching migratory birds: "Often since then, I've searched the night sky, and although I have caught the brief twist of bats flitting through currents of insects, I have never again seen that nighttime miracle of birds, secretly stitching together south and north with their hunger, with their collective, insistent, mounting realization of being in the wrong place at the wrong time."

On madness in the family: "In the way of all daughters, I watched my mother for clues to my future. Her madness terrified me in part because it was too easy for me to see that if I had inherited her small ankles and her oversized laugh, how could I have skipped the place where her ingenuity and passion sat too close to insanity on the spiraling legacy of heritage?"

The Canadian edition

I took the advance reading copy of this book on the plane with me to Asheville last month with the idea that I would leave it behind in the hotel in order to make room for the dozens of books I'd pick up at Winter Institute. Little did I know that the story and the language would get under my skin the way they did, so the book came home with me.  Incidentally, my ARC cover looks a lot like the Canadian edition, which I happen to think is quite superior to the US cover.

Penguin Press published this book in the US in January and I read a copy that was provided to me at my request by my wonderful sales rep.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson: audio book review

This is my last entry for my Official Audio Book Review Week--looks like I'll only have four entries instead of five.  But, oh, what a book it was!  If you have ever read my blog before, you might know about my love for Bill Bryson.  I've read more of his books than any other author's, and I've even read every word of his reference books.  This is all the more unusual since Bryson is a nonfiction writer and I'm an unapologetic reader of novels and not much else.  I've even had the pleasure of meeting the man not once, but twice, and they were two of the best days of my adult life. The fact that he would still have very little, if any, awareness of my existence is not a justifiable reason for suicide, or so I keep telling myself.  Every day.

Anyway, I read The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid back when it was first published, and my husband reminded me that we had listened to the audio of this book together during a trip to Hawaii (we did a lot of driving on the Big Island), which I had all but forgotten. So finishing up this audio book in my car last night was more like revisiting an old friend on two levels--both the content and the performance. Bryson is an excellent reader of his own books and I estimate that I've listened to his voice for upwards of 100 hours.

This book is a memoir of his childhood growing up in Des Moines, Iowa. He was the youngest of three children, born to a mother and father who both worked for the Des Moines Register (the local newspaper) at a time when not many women worked outside of the home, or at least not many wives and mothers. He grew up in a time of wonder (childhood in general) but also a time of national fear (the cold war, the Bay of Pigs, etc) and this juxtaposition makes for a pretty entertaining read.

Based on what I've read in his other books, I feel as if I generally have a good idea of Bryson's politics and social values, which is why some of the content in this memoir was all the more surprising. I don't actually believe that Bryson is a man who objectifies women or is homophobic (he does, alas, appear to be rather anti-Southern in most of his books), but those things were both present in his memoir.  That is, he spends a good bit of time specifically recalling the urgency with which he tries to enter the stripper tent year after year at the Iowa State Fair and trying to see naked women in general. Though Bryson becomes fast friends with a gay boy in his teens, there are the casual references to the negative social repercussions for kids who acted/looked/dressed gay, and the use of "gay" as a pejorative.

After a bit of reflection, I think Bryson was more likely trying to show an accurate reflection of growing up in middle America in the 1950s and 1960s, rather than trying to reflect his current views on anything in particular.

The downside, of course, of listening to a very funny audio book is that it's nearly impossible to excerpt   my favorite parts in a review.  Clearly it would take far more effort than I'm willing to expend to go find my copy of the actual book, flip through it, and decide which parts to quote here. So, suffice it to say that listening to Bryson is a singularly excellent experience.  If you've never read him before, I wouldn't necessarily recommend starting with Thunderbolt Kid--try A Walk in the Woods or In A Sunburned Country instead and prepare to be entertained and enlightened at once.

More mini book recs

Here are four book recommendations that are new (or new-ish) in paperback. Good reads at a good value!




HOME by Marilynne Robinson. Set in the same small Iowa town and peopled with minor characters from her Pulitzer prize-winning Gilead, Home is another powerhouse of a novel. Quiet but intense, she gives us a generous portrait of one family and the ways they deal with loyalty, desertion, and betrayal, set within the particular framework of the patriarch’s faith. Robinson takes a harder look at religion and simultaneously treats it with more generosity and respect than any fiction writer I know. A very fine piece of work. I was very pleased when Robinson was awarded the Orange Prize for this novel.



TWENTY CHICKENS FOR A SADDLE by Robyn Scott. This wonderful memoir tells the story of a girl and her family who move from New Zealand to Botswana so her parents can renew their childhood ties with Africa. Robyn and her siblings are homeschooled by their iconoclastic mother, much to their society grandmother's dismay, with occasional visits with their father to his medical clinics in the bush to round out their education. She chronicles her family's (mis)adventures with warmth and humor, and it's clear to see that the daily frustrations of living in such a remote area (in rather close quarters) are more than balanced by the fierce love the family has for each other and for their adopted country. A fantastic read for armchair (or real) travelers!

GOURMET RHAPSODY by Muriel Barbery. This new novel from the author of The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a foodie's delight. The gruff, pretentious food critic from the previous novel is on his deathbed in this latest offer, and chapters alternate between his own memories of food that changed his life and his family's not-so-charitable memories of him. From reading of his first taste of oysters to his reminiscences of a summer spent on a remote Greek isle, I don't think I've ever drooled over a book so much. Be sure to have something yummy on hand while reading to satisfy the intense food cravings that Barbery's writing evokes!

I couldn't resist sharing part of the oyster passage: "I bless the day my tongue discovered the intoxicating, almost erotic, velvet-smooth caress of an oyster slipping in after a chunk of bread smeared with salted butter...Between these two extremes--the rich warmth of a daube and the clean crystal of shellfish...the divine mouthful has become a religious act for all."

THE CONDITION by Jennifer Haigh. Haigh's newest effort showcases her special talent of peering deep into familes, dysfunctional or otherwise, to explore their inner workings and complicated bonds. Her clear-eyed perception gives the reader a double portrait of the McKotch family, both in their early days and after the children have become adults themselves, unmasking family secrets along the way. Nobody is better than Haigh at depicting the ties that bind or the myriad ways they can unravel, and she shows with heartbreaking accuracy just how childhood misunderstandings and grudges can harden over time to breed resentments that might be beyond forgiveness.