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My Favorite Books of 2020

11/24/2020

Like many other people, I think Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste is the finest new book of 2020. Wilkerson demonstrates that caste is best term to understand the complex race and class stratification in the United States. She has been to India and studied caste in that society. She also compares caste in the United States to Nazi Germany and shows that the Nazis used the U.S. South’s Jim Crow codes as a model for restrictions on Jews. The Nazis thought the South’s definition of the percentage of blood needed to fall in the despised caste was too strict. Let that sink in.
As usual, this is a list of my favorite reads of the year, many of which were not published this year.
Also as usual, most of them are novels.

The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates is an outstanding book about enslaved people trying to escape. The writing is luminous. Coates shows women with full agency. The viewpoint character is a man who comes to appreciate that women want to make their own decisions even more than they want love. Coates’ treatment of white characters is generous, showing some flawed but earnest abolitionists as well as slaveholders. The protagonist is the son of the man who owned and sold his mother. The father puts him in charge of his mentally deficient white half-brother, who has all the privileges of a white man and is supposed to inherit the estate.

Cantoras by Carolina de Robertis is a wonderful novel about lesbians living in Uruguay under a dictatorship in the 1970s and 80s. It is the story of a group of women, not just individuals. Books about groups of lesbians are rare, and this has believable, interesting characters. Life under the dictatorship is chilling. Everyone must live with great caution, lesbians particularly. Some of the characters suffer more than others. But they buy and refurbish a house on a deserted beach as a refuge. Their love relationships come and go, but the women ultimately have ties of friendship.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals by Saidiya Hartman considers the lives of young Black women who came North during the Great Migration. Some were met by scheming madams and pimps the minute they got off the train. Most went into grinding domestic work. Hartman celebrates those who tried to find joy in sex and love. She excoriates the social workers who forced them into “reform” institutions for being in relationships out of wedlock, to be followed by slave-like live-in domestic work. She tells how Billy Holiday, arrested for prostitution, pretended to be older than she was so she would be sent to prison rather than a “reform” institution because the prison terms were only three months while the other terms were three years. Hartman also celebrates Black lesbian, dyke, and bisexual women entertainers who enjoyed sexual freedom. She is a scholar who writes exuberantly.

The Mountains Sing by Nguyen Phan Que Mai is the story of a Vietnamese family living through the end of colonialism and the successive wars against it. At first, the characters sympathize with the liberation struggle, but they learn that some of the Communists can be as cruel as the people they opposed. The author grew up in Vietnam and now lives in Indonesia.

Jack is the fourth novel in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead series and is my favorite in the series, partly because it has much more dialogue than some of the other books. Jack, a character mentioned in earlier books, is the ne’er-do-well son of a white small-town Presbyterian preacher. Jack is an alcoholic compulsive thief who has served time in prison, but he is deeply intellectual and keeps thinking of theology though he isn’t sure he believes in it. He meets an African-American woman, a brilliant high school teacher, who also has a preacher father. They fall in love, but this is the 1940s and interracial marriage is illegal. Their relationship is believable and moving.

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng is so popular that it has already been made a television series, but this was my first encounter with it. It is a tale of two families, one privileged and the other on the run. A single mother who is an artist flees from place to place, not telling her daughter why. The daughter is attracted to the sons and daughters of the privileged family, while one of the daughters of the privileged family is drawn to the single mother.

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi is the story of a young Ghanaian-American woman is doing research in neuroscience. She went into the field because she wants to understand drug addiction, which killed her brother, and whether the brain can learn to resist it. She is also taking care of her mother, who had a permanent breakdown after her son’s death. The viewpoint character grew up in a Pentecostal church in Alabama and has difficulty with other science students who find it ridiculous that she is trying to reconcile religion and science.

The Door by Hungarian author Magda Szabo tells about a woman writer who was blacklisted under Communism and whose work is starting to become acceptable again. Nevertheless, she fears the authorities. She hires a housekeeper who is enigmatic and insists on controlling many aspects of the household. The writer, who is a little intimidated by her, is shocked to learn that the housekeeper saved both Jews from Nazis and right-wing people from Communists. The relationship between the writer and the housekeeper becomes devastating.

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell is a novel very loosely based on William Shakespeare’s family. Some critics and writers have claimed, based on little evidence, that Shakespeare had an unhappy marriage. This book, which features his wife, here called Agnes rather than Anne, suggests that the couple did love each other. Agnes is portrayed as knowledgeable about herbs, and so much of a child of nature that she insists on giving birth to their first child alone in the woods. But the death of their son, Hamnet (which really happened), greatly stresses the family’s bonds and makes William’s life in London more problematic for Agnes than it had been.

The History of Loneliness by John Boyne is the story of an Irish priest who is content with being celibate and for a long time fails to understand the abuse of boys by other priests. The son of a murderously abusive father, he tries to act the prescribed role of a good priest but begins to unravel as he discovers horrors in the Church.

Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Boyhood by Trevor Noah feels like an authentic experience of struggling communities in South Africa and growing up mixed race there. I had never seen Trevor Noah when I read the book, so it’s not just for fans.

Jimmy Bluefeather by Kim Heacox takes the reader to southeast Alaska, where an old Tlingit-Norwegian man who is the last canoe carver in his community tries to help his grandson cope with a serious injury and other difficulties. The old man is facing death and longs to go to a beloved glacial bay.

Light on Altered Land by Becky Bohan (admission—she’s a friend of mine) is a well-wrought love story about two women in early old age. One is a lesbian feminist; the other is woman who has been married to a man and has fallen in love with a woman. They learn how to communicate and develop their relationship.

Three by Anne Marie Monahan is one of the most lesbian feminist novels I have ever read. Well, perhaps lesbian separatist would be more accurate. Several lesbians decide to build a community on an abandoned human structure offshore. The community goes through several phases, moving toward deciding to become totally self-sufficient with no supplies from outside. Right. I found it interesting and believable.

I have to add the book I am currently reading, A Promised Land, a memoir by Barack Obama. If you love President Obama, it’s a must read. He narrates the Audible version and I enjoy hearing him.

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My Favorite Nonfiction in 2019

12/18/2019

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The nonfiction I read this year is an eclectic group of books.
     The Silk Roads by Peter Frangopan is a study of history from a perspective that is new for most Westerners: It sees Central Asia as the place where "civilization" developed. I thought China and India had the only important Asian ancient history east of the Tigris and Euphrates. I never thought of the cultural heritage of the ancient cities of Uzbekistan. I didn't know that Samarkand had been important. This is a detailed and interesting history from a nonwestern, and also non-Chinese, perspective.
     Say Nothing by Patrick Keefe is a remarkable history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, when the Protestant majority violently suppressed the Catholics and the IRA waged war on them. Both sides killed innocent bystanders. The book focuses on a few characters, among them Dolours Price and Gerry Adams. Don't know about Dolours Price? She and her sister Marian grew up in a family of Northern Irish Catholic resisters. Their father and grandfather went to prison for attacks on English people and their property. Dolours and Marian were involved in the killing and disposing of the body of a Catholic widow and mother of ten who the IRA believed was an informer. The book also includes a great deal of information about Gerry Adams, often seen as a hero of the Good Friday peace accord, but who the books says ordered foot soldiers like the Prices to carry out bombings and killings.
     An Autobiography of Ireland, edited by John Bowman, is a fascinating set of writings by 20th Century Irish people, many nonfamous and some famous. The subjects range widely from the account of a priest who was asked to go behind the barricades and minister to Irish rebels during the 1916 Easter Uprising, to the feminists who publicly brought contraceptives from Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland, where they were banned. It tells how bitterly Catholic fought Catholic after a peace treaty with England that some opposed, and how the Church opposed state-provided help for women and children.
     Our Ice Is Vanishing by Shelly Wright is about much more than the effects of climate change in the arctic. It tells the story of Canada's mistreatment of First Nations people in the arctic and subarctic. One aspect that particularly struck me is that in the 1950s, the Canadian government became anxious about its claim to the Far North. To maintain its claim, it sent groups of Inuits to land farther north than their traditional home land: That is, it sent people who had never experienced 24-hour-a-day darkness to a land where they would have to spend months in it. Wright is not a First Nations person, but she has been a teacher in the arctic and quotes many First Nations people.
     Being Caribou by Karsten Heuer is the amazing autobiographical story of a newly married young man and woman who followed the migration of the Porcupine caribou herd all the way from its winter home in Canada to its breeding grounds in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the United States. The couple made this long journey on foot. Keeping up with the caribou was difficult, because they ran for long distance but the humans couldn't. The couple encountered hunger, cold, and bears, many of which were indifferent to them but some that were aggressive. The most difficult part was losing the caribou for days at a time and worrying about finding them again.
     Liao Yiwu, who was imprisoned after the 1989 Tienanmen Square massacre, spent years interviewing nonstudents who supported the students and were arrested as a consequence. Liao says there hasn't been enough publicity about what happened to nonstudents and passersby. The result is Bullets and Opium. Everyone he interviewed (all men, because that's who would talk to him) spent a long time in prison, was tortured, and faced a dreadful life after being released. They have been unable to get work, and friends and even family have shunned them for fear of guilt by association. The stories are painful but important.
     The Good Immigrant, edited by Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman and Displaced People, edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen and collections of autobiographical stories by immigrants about their mostly difficult experiences, mostly in the United States, although some were about immigrants in other countries.
     How to Be an Anti-Racist by Ibram Kendi is a thoughtful book by a scholar who draws on his own experience in his discussion of racism. Kendi says the most important aspect of being an anti-racist is supporting anti-racist policies.
     If you are working in or have worked in a social movement, Berenice Fisher's Unhappy Silences is a fine meditation on silencing oneself or feeling silenced in political groups. Fisher gives many examples and tries to come up with solutions.
     I've read many other fine books. I have to depart from the theme of this blog to mention a novel that I've read since I posted a blog on my favorite fiction of the year. The Overstory by Richard Powers is an amazing saga about people's lives intertwined with trees. He follows a number of characters from childhood to adulthood and discusses their relationship with trees. Some become tree defenders who try to save ancient redwoods. The book is lyrical and full of insights. The characters are very diverse, except that there are no African American characters, which is a pity since the book is saga of these times.

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My Best Novel List for 2019

11/18/2019

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  Milkman by Anna Burns has to be high on my list of the best novels I read in 2019. This book, which won the 2018 Man Booker Prize, takes the reader into the war zone that was Northern Ireland during the Troubles in the 1970s. It is told in the first person by an 18-year-old Catholic girl who is being stalked by the Milkman, a high-ranking Renouncer or member of the Catholic paramilitary who defend Catholic neighborhoods from Protestant police and paramilitaries. Fear of informers is so great that Catholics aren't supposed to go to a hospital because they might be coerced into informing. This is truly a woman's perspective on that time.
    Margaret Attwood's The Testaments, a book that's only slightly more dystopian than Milkman, is a worthy sequel to The Handmaid's Tale. It gives an interesting perspective on the Aunts, the highest-ranking women in Gilead. I want to avoid spoilers.
    Lisa See's The Island of Sea Women tells about the Korean island of Jeju, where women divers who collected shellfish were the main breadwinners until recent decades. The divers form a close-knit community of women responsible for each other's lives in dangerous dives. Girls and women develop close friendships. The main characters go through World War II, the Korean War, and anti-Communist witch hunts. As usual, See's work feels authentic.
    Delia Owens' Where the Crawdads sing is the beautifully wrought story of a poor white girl in a small coastal town in the South. Everyone abandons her except an old African American couple who buy the shellfish she collects. She is brilliant, and nature is her refuge.
    What is goodness? That's one of the questions in Ann Patchett's The Dutch House. It's the story of how a girl and boy in Pennsylvania grew up after their mother left them without saying goodbye so she could work with the destitute in India. Her friends keep saying that she is such a good person. The son, who never knew his mother, begs to differ. He is the narrator. His older sister, who devotes herself to him, is the one who their mother's departure hurts the most. I don't always like family dramas, but this one moved me greatly.
    The nature of goodness, happiness, and suffering are the subjects of Aminatta Forna's Happiness: A Novel. Forna is a Scottish and Sierra Leonean writer. The book is set in London. The main characters are an American woman who is studying urban foxes and a Ghanaian psychiatrist who has spent much of his life working with war refugees. His perspective on suffering is well worth reading. The characters are as interesting as they are deep.
    Canadian writer Sharon Bala's The Boat People is a tale about Tamils persecuted in Sri Lanka who escape to Canada but are received with suspicion and confined for long periods of time. It's fiction: In recent years, Canada hasn't treated migrants this badly, though Canadians have mistreated Asian migrants in the past. I wish I could say the same about the United States.
    A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza is the story of an Indian Muslim family that has migrated to the midwestern United States. The older daughter, who longs for education, is hampered by her strict father and frustrated because she can't do what other girls her age are doing. There are strong ties between her and her brother, who also does not want to conform.
    There, There by Tommy Orange is the story of Indians (the term he chooses rather than Native American) who live in Oakland and struggle with poverty, abuse, alcoholism, and drugs. Many characters struggle successfully and affirm the value of being Indian. One character says that Urban Indians have been ignored and misunderstand by white people who believe that "real Indians" live on the land, meaning reservations and other rural areas. Indians in cities are living on the land: Cities, too, are part of the land, Orange's characters assert.

Lesbian Novels

    I also discovered some fine lesbian novelists. Penny Mickelbury has written a number of books, including Wings to Fly Away, a moving novel about a woman escaped from slavery who has come to Philadelphia and the community she finds there. Death's Echoes is a good detective story set in Washington, DC, that begins with white supremacists murdering a group of African American Muslim women. The detectives are a white lesbian cop and her partner, an African American lesbian top reporter.
    Cheryl A. Head writes detective stories set in Detroit. In Catch Me When I'm Falling, her African American lesbian detective investigates a series of murders of homeless people. The book feels authentic: Head clearly has learned a great deal about the lives of homeless people.
    Elena Graf has written a well-researched series set in Weimar Germany, then moving into the Nazi era. Her main character is a lesbian aristocrat who falls in love with a nun. The first novel is called Occasions of Sin. The aristocrat is believable, which means that she is snobbish, somewhat like Gentleman Jack. The depictions of nuns are sensitive and realistic.
    Ann McMan writes truly humorous lesbian novels. Her most recent, Beowulf for Cretins, is about a college English professor.

    I am writing a separate review of the nonfiction I have read this year.

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My Best Reads of 2018

12/10/2018

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This year saw the almost-a-century-delayed publication of a major work by Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon, an account of Hurston's devastating conversations with Cudjo Lewis, one of last Africans brought to the United States to be forced into slavery. He somehow came to terms with his terribly difficult life and became a kind, giving person. It's shocking that it took so long for this excellent book to be published.

Some of my favorite authors wrote new books in 2018. Barbara Kingsolver wrote Unsheltered, a novel about U.S. intellectuals whose lives are not what they expected. It's set in a town in New Jersey and moves between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. In the nineteenth century, the town is closely controlled by its founding family. A man who wants to teach real science in a public school finds himself blocked by that century's version of the Christian Right. But a brilliant woman makes scientific discoveries in her own home. That part is based on real people. The twenty-first century focus on a fictional family living in the same house. The parents are intellectuals who lost their professional niches when the husband's college folded. The wife, much against her wishes, has become an in-home caregiver for her right=wing father-law. The book looks at the problem with focusing on middle-class dreams in today's resource-depleted world.

Rosellen Brown, a favorite author who hasn't published a new book in 18 years, came out with The Lake on Fire, a novel about the travails of a nineteenth century family of poor Jewish immigrants who were given land in Wisconsin even though they had never farmed before. The daughter, who has been allowed only a short time in school, is determined to find the wider world. She runs away, and her younger brother follows her. They wind up in Chicago, which gives the author an opportunity to show the lives of the poor who work in sweatshops, contrasted with the lives of the Gilded Age rich.

Yet another favorite author, Elif Shafak, brought out Three Daughters of Eve, the story of a Turkish woman who grew up with an extremely pious Muslim mother and an almost atheist father. She lives her father's dream of going to Oxford, where she meets a professor who teaches about God as an idea without reference to religion. She is enchanted. The story moves between her college years and her later life as the wife of a businessman.

Syria

Some excellent books about Syria tore at my heart. English reporter Deborah Campbell wrote A Disappearance in Damascus, a memoir about the terrifying disappearance of a friend who was taken to one President Bashir Assad's prisons. A Syrian woman in exile, Samar Yazbek, wrote A Crossing, a memoir about going back to her hometown in Syria to help in the resistance against Assad. The account of town after town being bombed day after day is searing. Ausma Zehanat Kahn, one of the mystery authors whose work I most admire, produced A Dangerous Crossing, in which her Muslim and Jewish Canadian inspectors go to a refugee camp in Greece and learn about Syrian refugees and the smugglers who ferry them from Turkey to Greece.

Less-Publicized Wars

I rediscovered novelist Mary Gordon and was deeply impressed by There Your Heart Lies, a novel in which an American girl discovers her great aunt's life in Spain during its Civil War. The book is quite an indictment of the Roman Catholic Church's role in backing Franco. I hadn't realized how interconnected the Church and his regime were.

Arundhati Roy's new novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, is an indictment of right-wing, anti-Muslim Hindus and Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government. Not enough Americans understand how dangerous that government is. The finest writing in the book is in her section about the struggle for independence in Kashmir, a Muslim-majority area that India has never allowed to vote on whether to join Pakistan.

Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dagarembga's first novel in decades, The Mournable Body, is the story of Tambudzai, a woman who tries to escape life in her village and the traumas of her country's war of liberation. Her sister was crippled fighting in that war. Many people saw the women who fought not as heroes, but as witches. Tambudzai managed to get a college education, but she learned that even in postwar Zimbabwe, white people with the same education as she got the best jobs. She has to struggle desperately to stay afloat.

Fascist England and Trees as Protagonists

The alternative reality series I most enjoyed this year was Jo Walton's trilogy--Farthing, Ha'Penny, and Half a Crown—about a Britain that signed a peace with Hitler and slid into fascism as people didn't understand what was happening. The books are compelling and all-too-timely reading.

Another superb fantasy I read is N.K. Jemison's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, in which humans enslave the gods. A mixed- race girl whose grandfather is the planet's ruler is summoned to his court, where she meets the dangerous gods and just as dangerous humans.

I found relief in reading about trees. The Hidden Life of Trees, a wonderful book by German forester Peter Wohleben, tells how trees communicate with each other. American Canopy by Eric Rustow, a sadder book, tells the history of trees in the United States, which in many cases is the story of our destruction of trees, though it also looks at attempts to stop the destruction.

Amazing Autobiography

I recommend Sandra Lambert's autobiography, A Certain Loneliness. Lambert, a lesbian, has struggled with polio all her life. She loves nature and has learned to kayak, going alone into the Everglades and the Okefenokee Swamp. She has coped with major physical challenges, but some of the biggest challenges come from other people's insensitivity and inconsiderateness.

One more pitch (well, two more): For the story of a unique figure in lesbian history, read Indomitable: The Life of Barbara Grier by Joanne Passet. Grier was an editor of The Ladder and founded Naiad Press. For a truly scary, psychological lesbian mystery, read Alison R. Solomon's Along Came the Rain.

If you are on Goodreads, please follow my reviews there.

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My Best Reads of 2017

12/15/2017

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So many books, so little time! I want to tell about my favorites of the novels I read this year. My favorite nonfiction books were the books about Russia that I discussed in my previous blog.

Kamila Shamsie, one of my favorite authors, has written another superb book. Home Fires is the story of a family who, like Shamsie, are Pakistani British. The father was a jihadist who died in American custody. He had spent his time fighting and had no connection to his children. Their mother raised them to be moderates, but she has died. One of the two sisters is quiet and scholarly. The other cares more about her brother than about anything else in the world. The brother, the only one who does not excel in school, is recruited by the so-called Islamic State. The book is complex and compelling.

Miss Burma, written by Charmaine Craig, who is part Káren, one of Myanmar’s minority peoples, is another illuminating book. It tells how Burmans, not quite the country’s majority, had abused the other peoples in the territory so much that many minorities supported the British colonialists, who treated them more fairly. Both during World War II and after the British left, the Burmans massacred other peoples. This book focuses on the history of one Káren family, especially of the daughter who loves a rebel fighter but winds up unwillingly as a token Miss Burma. The book is excellent as a novel, not to mention as background on a country that most of us know little about. Knowing that Aung San Suu Kyi’s father, an independence leader, violently oppressed minority peoples makes today’s news easier to understand.

Pachinko by Korean-American author Min Jin Lee is another book about a people whose troubles most Americans know little about: people of Korean ancestry living in Japan. Like Miss Burma, this books shows history through the story of one family. For several decades until the end of World War II, Japan controlled Korea. Some Koreans went to Japan to get an education. The Korean War also led many Koreans to leave for Japan. But Japan did not accept them as full citizens. It has been, and still is, difficult for them to be able live in areas with decent housing and to get jobs. Hence many have worked in pachinko parlors, gambling houses where gangsters held sway. That gave rise to the stereotype that Koreans are gangsters. This book is successful both in creating a moving family saga and in illustrating the history.

Lisa See has long been one of my favorite authors. Her latest book, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, is about a girl of the Yao minority in China’s Yunnan province. Harvesting and marketing tea is the people’s livelihood. Women do the hardest work, the harvesting of sharp leaves that cut their hands. Premarital sex is encouraged, but pregnancy before marriage is a life-ruining disgrace. Li-yan, the protagonist, becomes pregnant. The father has gone away to earn money so they can marry. She gives birth to her baby in secret, then takes the baby girl to an orphanage. When Li-yan comes back later to retrieve her daughter, the girl has been adopted by an American couple. The story then goes back and forth between the mother’s life and the daughter’s.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Vietnamese-American author of the brilliant novel The Sympathizer, brought out a short story collection, The Refugees. I found it not quite as dazzling as the novel, but full of moving stories of Vietnamese refugees trying to adjust to life in the United States. There’s also an interesting story about an African-American Vietnam veteran whose daughter is dedicating her life to help the Vietnamese in reparation for his fighting there.

Leila Aboulela, a woman of Egyptian-Sudanese heritage who lives in Scotland, wrote The Kindness of Enemies, a book about cultural clashes that shifts between being a historical novel and a contemporary novel. The historical tale is about the clash between Chechens and Russians; the contemporary is about a British Muslim woman’s friendship for a student of hers who is accused of terrorism. Both stories are filled with nuances, ambivalence, and possible betrayals.

A Russian novel in translation, Ludmilla Ulitskaya’s The Big Green Tent, is reminiscent of Tolstoy. It is the story of several intelligent boys and girls growing up in Moscow. They meet in the 1950s and maintain their friendships, but find their lives shaped by bureaucratic repression. If you like good Russian novels, do read this one.

Noted Israeli author Amos Oz has written a new book, Judas. Its protagonist is an Israeli graduate student who is fascinated by the intellectual history of how Jews have written about Jesus of Nazareth. He’s no Christian, but he thinks Jesus should be discussed as a prophet. He meets old men who were involved in the founding of Israel who regret the ways the founders treated the Palestinians. This book is very interesting, but I found the protagonist’s story of a passion for a mysterious woman pretty tedious.

Stay With Me by Nigerian author Ayobami Adebayo is a unique and moving novel. Yejide, a girl whose mother died giving birth to her, grew up in a family where her father had several wives, but none of them were motherly to her. When she’s in college, she meets Akin, and they fall in love. They marry, but are unable to have a child. Akin’s family demands that he marry a second wife so he can have children. Yejide is distraught. What happens after that is very different from what I expected. You can’t predict what’s going to happen in this unusual story.

Salt Houses, a novel by Palestinian-American author Haya Alyan, who is a poet and a psychologist, tells the story of a Palestinian family that has to move to several different countries. The family matriarch, Salma, has to leave her home after the Six-Day War. Her son becomes involved in politics and disappears. Her daughter Alia has to move to Kuwait because her husband wants to live there, though she hates the desert and feels trapped. When Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait, the family has to leave. They are scattered to Beirut, Paris, and Boston.

Emma Donohue has long been one of my favorite authors. An Irish lesbian who now lives in Canada, she has written several historical novels as well as more contemporary ones. Her latest novel, The Wonder, is set in rural Ireland in the 19th century, just a few years after the great famine. An 11-year-old girl is refusing to eat. She says that Jesus is feeding her manna from heaven. The people of her town believe that’s a miracle. To authenticate or disprove the miracle, the town’s leading people engage an English nurse and an Irish nun to watch to see whether the girl eats. The story seems extreme to some, but if you grow up as a Catholic girl who wanted to make sacrifices, as I did, the book resonates deeply.

If We Were Villains, a novel by M.L. Rio, a woman who studied Shakespeare at King’s College London and the Globe, is a must for anyone who is crazy about Shakespeare and a good read for anyone who enjoys psychological novels. It’s the story of a group of students who specialize in Shakespeare at a college that focuses on the arts. It’s comparable to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History as a fascinating study of a small group of students. The characters are obsessed with Shakespeare and tend to play out their roles in real life.

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It's Time to Learn More About Russia

12/5/2017

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We’re now constantly focused on what’s happening in Washington, but it’s important to understand the rest of the world as well. There are all too many reasons why we should know more about Russia, not least Vladimir Putin’s predilection for backing the right wing in western countries and interfering in our elections.

Why Putin Is Really a Bad Guy

Yes, you know that Putin is dangerous. But how much do you know about him?

To learn more about Putin, I read The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin by journalist Masha Gessen, who reported on Russia from the end of the USSR to 2013. This book covers Putin’s life to 2012. I then read The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, her book that covers Russia to 2017, showing the rest of Putin’s regime; the beginning of independent academic inquiry, which he squelched; and the lives of several young people who came of age in the post-Communist years.

Gessen is brilliant, and I am proud to say that she is a lesbian. She was born in Russia, brought by her dissident parents to the United States when she was 11, and in her 20s went back to Russia to report on it, which she did for two decades. She left Russia because she and her partner have three children, one of whom is adopted. In 2013, Russia passed a law saying that the state had the right to take away the adopted children of gay and lesbian parents. Gessen now lives in New York City.

Putin was always a bully. Since he has been in the public eye, he has bragged that he was a “thug” when he was young, beating up other boys when he chose. He joined the KGB, the secret service, where he undoubtedly continued to bully people in a more intimidating way. He wanted to be a spy and was disappointed in being assigned to Dresden, East Germany, where the most he could do was look for dissidents. He was furious when in 1989 a group of civilians tried to break into the KGB office in Dresden where he was stationed. The civilians were persuaded to withdraw. But when the KGB asked the Red Army for help, the army said it could do nothing without orders from Moscow. Moscow was silent, and Putin was enraged that his country seemed impotent.

But how did Putin come to the public eye? He became a deputy to mayor of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). There, Gessen learned, he took millions of dollars’ worth of food that was supposed to go to the hungry city, sold it, and kept the money. That sort of profiteering helped him accumulate a fortune. Some say he is now the world’s richest man.

From that not particularly central post in Russia’s second city, he caught the attention of people like billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who recommended him to Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first elected president, as a good head for the FSB, the successor organization to the KGB. (Khodorovsky later decided to support Putin’s critics, and Putin jailed him – and took over his oil company.)

Yeltsin was democratic by Russian standards. He engaged in electoral politics and supported free speech. But he had alienated the people by letting profiteers become wealthy through taking over businesses that had been state owned in the Soviet Union. He did nothing to ease the sudden loss of people’s life savings when the Soviet Union collapsed. Yeltsin also was frequently drunk and disorderly.

The people at the top liked Putin because he seemed rational and compliant. Yeltsin’s alcoholism and sometimes erratic behavior caused him to lose popularity. An election was coming up in 2000, and reformers were going to contest the presidency.

In Russia, the head of the government (it used to be the head of the Communist Party) goes on television on New Year’s Eve to greet the nation. On the cusp of the new millennium, Yeltsin went on TV and resigned, telling people that Putin was their new president, even though there was no legal basis for Yeltsin to hand over his job to his choice of successor. Once Putin held the office, he was poised to win the election in March 2000.

Why did people accept Putin, a man scarcely known at that point? The public had already become disillusioned by the sense of chaos and the collapse of the economy. Moreover, there had been a series of bombings destroying apartment buildings, and the government said the Chechens, who had rebelled against Moscow a few years earlier, were to blame.

Gessen investigated the bombings as much as she could and is convinced that the FSB, not the Chechens, was to blame. The bombings set the stage for people to want a strong leader, and Putin was portrayed as strong.

Many people had lost their life savings under Yeltsin’s move to capitalism, which in turn made many distrust democracy, which has had almost no history in Russia. Rule by a strong man was more familiar.

Gessen suggests that Putin’s rise might have been stage-managed starting years before his presidency.

Analysts in the West and those few independent academics in Russia long believed that Putin was an authoritarian ruler, not a totalitarian one. Authoritarianism could be seen as a political system that controls the public arena but doesn’t care much about people’s lives as long as they are compliant. Totalitarian regimes try to control people’s thoughts as well as the public sector.

In her second book, Gessen says that totalitarianism is authoritarianism plus an ideology. Putin’s regime now has an ideology: supposed support of “traditional values.” The government has conflated homosexuality with pederasty and convinced the population that “western values” like democracy and acceptance of lesbians and gays are destroying the West and have no place in Russia. His government has formed links with right-wing groups in the United States and Europe to promote that ideology.

In the early 1990s, college social science departments, long bastions of Communist ideology that discouraged research, began embracing intellectual inquiry. But that has been squelched in recent years.

Polls by the Levada Institute, an independent organization in Russia, show that in the early 1990s Russians were much more accepting of people who different from them, such as rock enthusiasts and “sexual minorities,” than they are now. When Russians are asked who was the greatest person in history, the choice is often Stalin, with Putin coming in second.

When the Soviet Union had few consumer goods for its citizens, Russians prided themselves on their country’s size and importance in the world. When it lost its empire, Russians felt a sense of loss. For many, their country’s hard-won victory in the Great War (their name for World War II) is still its proudest hour. The government and media focus on nostalgia for those times, so even children today look to the victory over the Nazis as their country’s greatest achievement. Books and movies still celebrate KGB agents as heroes, and young people fall into believing that.

The young people whom Gessen followed through the past two decades have either become protesters or dropped out of society. All were disillusioned and believe that Russia has no future.

The government has not only moved to imprison more dissidents in recent years, but also is clearly behind the murder of some, most notably Boris Nemtsov, the most well known of them. I suspect that dissident Alexei Navalny, who has had acid thrown in his face, won’t live to be old. He plans to run for president in 2018, but is barred because of probably false charges of embezzlement.

I strongly urge you to read Gessen’s books. She also writes for U.S. magazines such as The New Yorker, including articles looking at the Trump administration, which she sees as dangerous.

Gorbachev

One of Russia’s paradoxes is that the people detest their finest leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev: His Life and Times, a new biography by Amherst College political science professor William Taubman, tells the story of Gorbachev’s life from childhood to the present. Taubman was able to interview Gorbachev and many people who have known him.

From childhood on, Gorbachev was the antithesis of Putin. Whereas young Vladimir distinguished himself as someone to fear, young Mikhail distinguished himself by feats of farm labor with his father that gained them both medals. Gorbachev became a popular student leader in school and in the Komsomol (Communist youth group) and loved to act in plays.

At Moscow State University, he met his wife Raisa, a philosophy student who became his closest companion until her death in 1999. The men who worked with and for him often resented his listening to her so much. People made fun of the fact that she often appeared in public with him, which was far different from the position of other Soviet leaders’ wives.

He was known for being incorruptible and for drinking little. His squeaky clean persona contributed as much as his intelligence to his rise in the Communist Party. He believed in Communism and acceded to the Party line.

But when Gorbachev became first secretary of the Supreme Soviet in the 1970s, he was able to take several trips to Western Europe, which transformed him. He visited the Communist parties in Italy and France and saw that they operated within a democratic political system. He wanted democracy for his country and began his transition to a social democrat, though at first he wanted democratic competition to take place inside the Party for a lengthy transition period before other parties were included.

When he became leader of the Communist Party in 1985, he tried to democratize it. His mistake apparently was not realizing that trying to bring democracy to his country before enabling people to purchase more material goods was a recipe for failure. (The Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping thought Gorbachev was stupid for putting democracy ahead of economic development.)

One of the first reforms Gorbachev tried was greatly reducing the availability of alcohol because he saw how badly alcoholism affected people’s health and their work. That plan worked as well as Prohibition did in the United States: It made people angry at him.

He made many other mistakes, particularly in trying to keep a balance between old Party hacks who detested him and the reformers who initially supported him, which made it seem that he championed neither.

Though Russians blame him for the collapse of the Soviet Union, this book shows that Yeltsin was the one whose moves led to its dissolution.

The book tells how much Gorbachev hated violence. Even when the USSR was losing its grip on Eastern Europe, he refused to resort to it (except for some repression in Lithuania). He was opposed to nuclear weapons, and he, not Ronald Reagan, was the one we have to thank for ending the Cold War. Reagan’s advisers and Bush’s advisers after him had trouble believing that Gorbachev was sincere, but he was.

I came away from the book convinced that Gorbachev was one of the heroes of the 20th century.

Ordinary Russians

I’ve just read Bears in the Streets: Three Journeys Across a Changing Russia, a book by writer Liza Dickey, who traveled across Russia from Vladivostock to Moscow in 1995, 2005, and 2015. She tried to talk with the same people each time.

Of course she found changes. In some places, like Vladivostock, a Pacific Coast city, the people she met were much more affluent in 2015 than they had been 20 years earlier. The young people were health conscious and fashion conscious. But in rural areas like Buryatia (north of Mongolia), once prosperous farmers had lost much of what they had when they bought land after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Dickey visited the “Jewish Autonomous Homeland” of Birobidzhan set up by Stalin in the Russian Far East, and learned that by 2015 most of the Jews had gone to Israel. A history of harsh discrimination had made them fearful. There wasn’t a real functioning synagogue in 1995, but there is a large one now, and schools now teach Yiddish and Jewish history. Hebrew is being phased out of secondary schools because teachers see it as the language of those who want to emigrate, but it is taught at the university. Now there are large statues of menorahs and shofars in the streets.

Dickey is intrepid, and I’m proud to say that she’s a lesbian. She worried about disclosing her lesbian identity, but by 2015 she came out to a number of the people she met. Many said, “I’m all right with it, but don’t tell anyone else.”

She learned that attitudes toward the United States had hardened by 2015, mirroring the hardening of political relations between the nations after Russia annexed Crimea. Many people said they loved Putin, and they asserted that what Russia does is none of America’s business. They pointed out that Russia has no bases near the United States, but the United States has bases almost surrounding Russia. (They didn’t say that the nations where the bases are located for the most part asked for the bases because they were afraid of Russia, some of them having been occupied by Russia. Dickey didn’t mention that because she didn’t want to get into arguments.) She learned that Russians distrust the United States as much as Americans distrust Russia, although they were willing to make an exception for individual Americans and were friendly to Dickey. People across Russia used the same phrase, claiming that Americans see Russia as a primitive place where “bears run in the streets,” so that must be what their press tells them Americans think.

The Russians also like products from the U.S., though they don’t always know where the products are made. Some Russian friends of Dickey’s were stunned to hear that Coca-Cola was an American brand.

Almost everyone she met said that even though they have far more material goods now, they thought life was better under the Soviet Union because they felt more secure about jobs, education, healthcare, and pensions. One affluent couple who didn’t say life was better then said it was just as good, only different.

The gay men and the one lesbian that Dickey met did not share the nostalgia for the old regime, and neither did the one performer she knows.

I recommend these books to anyone who wants a deeper understanding of Russia.

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Books of 2016

12/16/2016

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It was a terrible year in politics. What an understatement! But 2016 was a good year for books, when I was able to tear myself away from Facebook and the newspapers (not television—leaving that is never difficult for me, and I'll watch less than ever now).
     I read more than sixty books this year, but I won't burden you with details of them all. I'll mention many fine ones, mostly new or newish.

From Saigon to Beijing
     No one of my generation can forget the war in Vietnam, where our country fought an “enemy” that hadn't threatened us in the slightest. The Sympathizer, by Vietnamese-American Viet Thanh Nguyen, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize. The prize was well deserved. The book's narrator is Vietnamese, the illegitimate son of a priest, who grows up deprived. Not surprisingly, he joins the Communists. He has two close friends from school, one of whom is a more dedicated Communist and the other who abhors Communism. The Party gives the narrator a mission: pretend to support the South Vietnamese government and spy on it. When that government is airlifted from Saigon, he is told to go to the United States and continue spying on South Vietnamese who have gone to live there. The narrator is an intellectual, constantly reexamining his opinions about Vietnam and the United States.
     Another great book by an Asian North American is Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien, a Chinese-Canadian. Learned in mathematics and music, she tells about the fate of Chinese musicians who loved western music during the Cultural Revolution, when western music was banned. The characters are complex and the story is compelling.

Today's Wars
     Another mathematician-turned-author, Zia Haider Rahman, wrote an intricate novel, In the Light of What We Know, which looks at his native Bangladesh as well as Britain, the United States, and Afghanistan. This is a tale of corruption, and Rahman knows of what he speaks. He has worked with international organizations, including Transparency International, which fights corruption. His conclusion seems to be that western intervention, even by human rights workers, does more harm than good.
     I also read other books about the ongoing wars in that part of the world. Kim Barker's Taliban Shuffle is a more serious book than the movie Whiskey Tango Foxtrot would indicate. It tells a great deal about Pakistan's involvement in Afghanistan, which is crucial to understanding the war. Fariba Nawa, who was born in Afghanistan but raised in the United States, went back to the country of her birth and, in Opium Nation, tells how drug trafficking has changed Afghanistan as much as war and how both government and Taliban forces are involved in drug trafficking. Both these authors think that a western withdrawal might be best for Afghanistan.
     But Christina Lamb, a British reporter who spent many years in Pakistan and Afghanistan, produced an even more in-depth study of the war, Farewell Kabul. I strongly recommend reading it to see how Pakistan has manipulated the Taliban and pushed it to continue fighting even when it didn't want to. She believes that westerners should continue to be involved in trying to counter the Taliban and other radical Islamists in that area of the world.
     Socialist feminist Meredith Tax produced a more hopeful book, A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State, which is about Kurdish women. She recounts how Syria, Iraq, and especially Turkey, have long oppressed the Kurds with pogroms and suppression of their language and culture. Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against them. After that, the West began to recognize their oppression, but was reluctant to anger Turkey.
     The Kurd separatist leader Abdullah Ocalan at first called himself a Marxist-Leninist and waged an extremely violent struggle, including killing subordinates who opposed him. But while imprisoned by Turkey he underwent a conversion to anarchism and to the idea that women, not the proletariat, are the leading revolutionary class. As a result of that theory, Kurdish women in the struggle joined the army, including a separate women's army, and now have more power, especially in the region of Rojava in Syria. The “Islamic State” (IS) fights them, and they fight it.
    But the PKK, Ocalan's party, is still carrying out suicide bombings, including one on December 10 outside a soccer stadium in Istanbul that killed 39 people. How admirable is that?
     Tax does not gloss over the possibility that if the Kurds' liberation struggle succeeds, women may no longer hold a high position in their society. That has happened so often after revolutions.
     Then there's the tragedy of Syria. In The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria, journalist Janine di Giovanni interviews a wide range of people living in Syria who have been brutalized by Assad's government and paramilitary forces, including women who were raped and tortured in Assad's prisons. She also spoke with people who were brutalized by jihadists opposing Assad, including IS. She found that many people feared Islamist insurgents more than Assad. Christians and other minority religious groups have strongly supported Assad because they fear suppression. She says Syria was a melting pot, like Bosnia, where people of different religions and ethnicities had lived together. And then violence and hatred drove them apart.
     Di Giovanni had started war reporting in Bosnia. She has worked in refugee camps. Somehow she has managed to often witness mass graves and people who had been tortured. She almost despairs over the difficulty of stopping, much less preventing, wars. After years of watching the United Nations and other groups try to end or mitigate the wars in Syria and other countries, she says, “ceasefire is a synonym for buying time to kill more civilians,” as both sides try to get themselves in the most advantageous position before the official start of the ceasefire. She feels that war is simply not worth the cost in human suffering. Reading her book left me with that feeling.
     I also recommend Yasmine El Rashidi's Chronicle of a Last Summer, an upper-middle-class young woman's account of the deterioration of life in Egypt since the Arab Spring; Laila Lashimi's The Moor's Account, a historical novel about an educated man from Morocco who sells himself as a slave to feed his family and winds up dragged through North America in a brutal Spanish expedition to find gold; and Izzeldin Abuelish's autobiography, I Shall Not Hate, the story of a doctor from Gaza who has worked to heal Israelis as well as Palestinians though some of his daughters were killed in their home by an Israeli bombing.

War in Europe
     In trying to understand war, I also read novels about wars in Europe. Anthony Doerr's All The Light We Cannot Not See is a sensitive novel about a blind French girl who tries to fend for herself alone when the Nazis occupy her city. A poor German boy who never wanted to be a soldier is also a major character. It's problematic to feel sympathy for a German soldier in World War II, but this character is punished for opposing brutality as he is forced into the military system because he is brilliant at making mechanical devices.
     After a long period in which few writers dealt with the genocidal war waged by Serbs in the 1990s, more novels about the genocide are being published. Some Croatian fighters also engaged in genocide. Girl at War by Sara Novic is a powerful novel about a Croatian girl's terrifying war experiences. Irish writer Edna O'Brien's The Little Red Chairs takes a traditional Irish theme--a stranger coming to a small town--and turns it to horror because the stranger is a Serb leader guilty of genocide who pretends to be a healer. Horribly, an unhappy Irish woman falls in love with the disguised killer.
     Scottish mystery writer Val McDermid also wrote about the Bosnian War in The Skeleton Road, which focuses on how hard war crimes are to investigate because people try to block information about them. An even finer crime novel about cover-ups of the genocide is Pakistani-Canadian Ausma Zehnat Khan's The Unquiet Dead, which I mentioned last year.
     Not all horror comes in wars. John Vaillant's The Jaguar's Children tells the story of a young Mexican man's tragic attempt to cross the border to the United States because he fears for his life.

U.S. Novelists
     Colson Whitehead's intricate novel The Underground Railroad won the National Book Award, and it deserved to win. Its chronicle of a young woman's attempt to escape from slavery describes the horrors of the slave system. Whitehead also uses magical realism to make the Underground Railroad an actual railroad and to paint systems of slavery in different states that are not as they actually were but are illustrations of the manifestations that racism can take.
     I read two insightful books by Chickasaw author Linda Hogan. Power is the story of a girl growing up in a tribe in the Florida swamps that mostly escapes the attention of the white world. But a hurricane changes her life. This is a tale of the power and mystery of nature. The Woman Who Watches Over the World, Hogan's autobiography, tells of learning to survive many heartbreaks, including trying to adopt children who have been abused.
     I also read Raising Ourselves, the autobiography of Alaska Native Velma Wallis, of Gwich'in Athabascan descent. Growing up 200 miles north of Fairbanks, she learned to trap and hunt and moved to a cabin in the wilderness to escape the alcoholism and fatalism in her village and to try to help her mother escape also.
     Elizabeth Strout's novel My Name Is Lucy Barton tells the story of a white woman who comes from extreme poverty. When Lucy was a child, her family lived in a garage. It is hard for her parents to express emotion. Lucy has difficulty navigating a world where people assume that she has had experiences she never had, such as owning a television when she was growing up. In later life, when Lucy is hospitalized and her mother comes to New York City to be with her, communication is strained.
     Nathan Hill's The Nix is an intricately spun tale. It's the story of a boy abandoned by his mother. He becomes an English professor but is so disgusted by students he perceives as banal that he immerses himself in video games. Then a woman is arrested for throwing rocks at a right-wing politician. It turns out that she is his long-lost mother. And that's just the beginning. It's quite a story, but there is a strain of resentment of autonomous women. One '60s radical woman has an unbelievable affair with a policeman whom she begs to be violent with her.
     I also read three Willa Cather novels that I had never read before and like better than some that are more famous. One of Ours is the story of a young Nebraskan man whose struggle to learn reminds me of Jude the Obscure. He winds up in World War I. Song of the Lark, a rare Cather book with a female protagonist, tells about a girl whose life is focused on becoming a great singer. The Professor's House includes a segment about a young man who tries unsuccessfully to negotiate the Washington bureaucracy.

You'll Always Have Shakespeare
     For comfort, I turn to Louise Penny's sensitive but not heartbreaking mysteries, Jo Walton's excellent fantasy about a world based on an attempt to create a world like Plato's Republic (the final novel of the trilogy being Necessity), and Shakespeare.
     Hogarth Press is publishing a series of novels based on Shakespeare's plays. The latest and so far the best is Margaret Atwood's Hag-Seed, which is based on The Tempest. A theater director forced out of his position by a wicked rival retreats to a remote town where his only companion is his fantasy of his daughter who died. He begins to direct plays in a prison, and builds up to staging his version of The Tempest, with actual revenge included. There's a need to suspend disbelief, but the story is great.
     I am delighted by a new book by a Shakespeare scholar, Andrew Dickon: Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare's Globe. Dickon went to Poland, Germany, the United States, India, South Africa, and China to learn how directors and actors in those countries interpret Shakespeare. For instance, the Germans have long called the poet “our Shakespeare” and claim him as really Germanic. In World War I, while England produced Henry V to inspire its soldiers, Germany produced the same play to urge on German soldiers. Dickon searched for missing Nazi era archives of the German Shakespeare Society and learned how it collaborated.
     I also learned, among many other things, that Shakespearean plays like Coriolanus and Cymbeline are far more popular in some other countries than they are in the United States. (I do not recommend Cymbeline unless one wants to see every play that Shakespeare wrote.)
     British imperialist education played a large role in spreading Shakespeare, but Shakespeare has outlasted the empire even as many excellent writers emerge everywhere. Different translations have become adaptations that vary from the original plays. Dickon sees that as a sign of Shakespeare's vitality.
     Read, read, read. If only everyone did.

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Hamlet in the Laundry Room; Lancelot in the Living Room

6/28/2016

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My life as a writer is full of glamour. While I am moving clothes from the washers to the driers in the basement of my apartment house, I may be thinking about a play I'm writing that's a take-off on Hamlet. How distressed is Ophelia? Darn, this drier isn't working. I have to move my clothes to the next drier. Why did someone leave their clothes in the drier after they were dried? How much did Hamlet care about Ophelia, anyway? His claim that he loved her more than forty thousand brothers is ridiculous.
            Darn, I dropped the pillowcase on the floor. How did Hamlet feel when he learned he'd killed Ophelia's father? Why didn't he tell her he was sorry? Do writers who are famous do their own laundry? I need to add more money to my laundry card.
            Just thinking about my characters and knowing I'm going to write about them makes me happy. There are 35 minutes between the time I get upstairs and the time I have to go back down to get the laundry. I can get some writing done.
            Lancelot sits in my living room. She is a quiet presence. Her demeanor is seldom cheerful. I see her frowning because Guinevere is married to someone else. Lancelot sighs. I sigh with her. I take my dirty dishes to the kitchen and wash them.
            Lancelot is still in the living room when I come back. She feels cramped indoors. So do I, although I can't ride a horse as well as she can, and in fact I'm afraid of horses. But my legs long to go to the river and walk. I need to put at least one headline in my blog so that readers with a short attention span will want to continue reading. That's what the social media teacher says, so here goes.
Lancelot Is Lonely
            How can I describe Lancelot? Does it matter whether she is handsome? She ages. She weeps sometimes when she is alone. Guinevere knows that, and it makes her sad, even though her temperament is not naturally as sad as Lancelot's.
            I wouldn't want to live without Lancelot. I can't. She's part of me.
            She may not be the most contemporary heroine. She may not be struggling with issues like today's racism. But she knows all about war, and she has seen poverty. She has witnessed suffering, and shared in it.
            Unlike me, she has killed. There are circumstances in which I would kill. In self-defense, if the only way to defeat my assailant was to kill him. To protect someone I love whose life was threatened. If I could.
            It's sad that Lancelot has killed, but not that she has the skill to do so.
            I don't have food for dinner. I have to go to the market. I'm lucky to live near a market. I need to make a shopping list. Why do I write fantasy? To escape the ordinary?
            I'm out of paper towels, but I have enough toilet tissue.
            How do I portray a King Arthur who is a good king, but who cares too much about power? Don't all kings – and presidents – care too much about power? Power over others, that is, not empowerment.
            How does power affect those who have it? Can anyone with great power remain a good person?
            Where are the car keys? Is my grocery list complete? Did I forget anything? Do I need more mayonnaise? Which night am I going out to dinner? Tomorrow?
            Lancelot still looks sad.
            Should I work on the Hamlet play, or go back to the Lancelot sequel? What a wonderful choice. But I must work on whichever is closest to being done. Finishing what I start has to be one of my most important values.
            I forgot the laundry. I have to take a detour to the basement. The basement is plain, utilitarian. But what difficulty Lancelot must have had cleaning her menstrual rags without anyone seeing her. No, she probably buried them.
            She's just posing as a man. She doesn't want to have a man's body. How wonderful that she has developed her strength and can defeat evil men.
            I shouldn't have stopped taking karate after a few months. Decades ago. I've been fortunate that I haven't had to defend myself physically.
            A friend of mine in the building was once confronted by a knife-wielding man in this basement, years ago. She was lucky. She got away unscathed. But the man wasn't caught.
            Danger can come at any time. Lancelot knows that.
            I fold my T-shirts and put the polo shirts on clothes hangers. Women must have died from abortions in Lancelot's day, as they still do today. I put the smaller items in a bag. I sling my pants over the arm of the laundry cart, then over my shoulder. I pick up the bag and go upstairs. I lay the pants on a chair and put the bag in the bedroom, then I go downstairs to get the shirts.
            Would Lancelot have joined the feminist movement if she lived today? Guinevere would.
            I carry the rest of the clothes upstairs. Lancelot liked wearing chain mail, but I wouldn't have liked it. I don't have the strength to use the kind of sword she would have used.
            Her sword was not taken from a maiden in a lake. It was just an ordinary sword, but she was extraordinary.
            I'm not Lancelot, but I do wear pants, because I don't want to play the female role. I want to be androgynous.
            Lancelot is still in the living room when I return.
            I guess I'm working on Lancelot today, not Hamlet. Here's a link to my first novel about Lancelot: www.amazon.com/Lancelot-Story-Carol-Anne-Douglas ebook/dp/B017A4L28C/ref=sr_1_1s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1467153435&sr=1-1&keywords=
lancelot+her+story

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Trying to Learn About Afghanistan

4/22/2016

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What do we really know about Afghanistan? Two books I have read recently provide different but complementary views. One is Opium Nation by Fariba Nawa, an Afghan American journalist; the other is Taliban Shuffle by Kim Barker, a Euro-American journalist. Both spent years in Afghanistan in the first decade of the 21st Century. Taliban Shuffle has been made into a movie and its title has been changed to Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. Don't judge the book by the movie. The movie is simplistic and includes a man-crazy blonde journalist who wasn't in the book. But the book is worth reading.

Fariba Nawa was born in Afghanistan, but her parents fled to the United States when she was a child. At that time, Russia was fighting to occupy Afghanistan. When her grade school was bombed, her parents had had enough.

But her parents weren't happy in the United States. Her father missed the intellectual life in Afghanistan and the opportunity to practice his profession, which he couldn't do in the United States. Her mother was sad because she missed her family and friends. Fariba missed the people, language, food, and culture of Afghanistan. She liked her American teachers, but not the other students, who were too rude for her.

Nawa was dismayed at the September 11, 2001 attacks, the U.S. reaction, and the sight of her two countries at war. She felt she had to return to Afghanistan. Although her parents weren't happy in the United States, they believed she was foolish to try to go back.

Fariba Nawa went to Afghanistan as a journalist and found it in disarray. Many people, at least at first, were glad to have the Americans come to fight the Taliban.

Nawa complains that Hamid Karzai was chosen as the country's leader by the Americans. She says that a democracy cannot succeed unless it controls its political process. Many Afghans preferred the former king, but the Americans deemed him too old.

She saw that the opium trade was one of Afghanistan's major problems. She took many risks, interviewing people involved in every part of the trade, including drug lords.

Farmers have had little choice but to grow opium since the Russians came and the mujahideen fought them. Trees have been cut down and fields are no longer fertile enough for many other crops. The farmers make what little they can from growing opium, but of course the profits go mostly to others. Drug lords force simple farmers into becoming drug couriers, mostly to Iran, which is combating the spread of opium by jailing and often executing the sometimes hapless couriers.

Opium has become the medium of exchange in Afghanistan. All parties sell it: warlords, the government, the Taliban, and foreigners. Despite their professed enmity, they often sell opium to each other and accept bribes from each other.

Nawa says that when the Taliban cracked down on opium production, they did so only to keep the prices up. When occupiers like Britain and the United States have tried to eradicate opium, they have hurt poor farmers most, not the drug lords. Nawa was overwhelmed by how much opium has affected her country.

Opium was grown traditionally as a medicine and used mostly in moderate quantities, she writes. It was British colonialists, specifically the East India Company, backed by the British government, which started the international opium trade and forced the Chinese to buy large quantities of opium so that the British could have a product to exchange for tea, which they coveted.

Nawa went to a Mother's Day event in Afghanistan, and was surprised that the subject that the women discussed was opium. Mothers wept about their sons' addiction.

She met a girl who did everything she could to resist becoming a child bride. Nawa was able to persuade the older man the girl was promised to (a drug lord) to postpone the wedding, but eventually he took the girl away and married her. She was given to him in payment for an opium debt: Her father had been forced to sell it, but he went missing, apparently caught and probably killed. His family couldn't repay the drug lord for the lost opium. Numerous other girls have met similar fates.

When she was in Afghanistan, Nawa met a man who treated her like a person and became a friend. She married him and has been happy with him and her children in a marriage of shared responsibilities. They lived for several years in the United States, where she reported on the U.S. Muslim community, among other things. I particularly remember her writing about progressive mosques, where women have a greater role than the traditional one.

At one point, Nawa brought her father back to Afghanistan to stay with relatives there. He thought he wanted to visit, but he discovered that the intellectual life he remembered had disappeared. The people he knew were either gone or hardened by constant struggle. He decided that life in the United States, though it disappointed him, was better.

Nawa still loves Afghanistan, but she grieves for it and worries about family and friends who still live there. She now is practicing journalism in Turkey.

Through reading Nawa's Facebook posts, I learned about two fine novels about Afghanistan by Nadia Hashimi, an Afghan-American doctor: The Pearl That Broke Its Shell and When the Moon Is Low (see my February 16, 2016 blog). The former book is the story of a girl growing up in a family that raises her as boy. Her story is interwoven with the story of a rebellious great aunt. The contemporary girl reaches puberty and is forced to marry. The book takes us up to present-day Afghanistan and its leaders.

Reading the latter book, the story of a family of Afghan refugees, gives a clear picture of how squalid and brutal life in refugee camps in Greece can be, and of the refugee camp in Calais that the French government recently destroyed (while providing no better place for refugees). I encourage you to read this book and see what life is like for the refugees the European Union seems determined to return to Afghanistan, under the pretense that Afghanistan is safe. According to the United Nations’ mission in Afghanistan, 600 civilians were killed and 1,343 were wounded by fighting in the first three months of 2016; more than 80,000 people were displaced just during those months (The New York Times, April 18, 2016). About one-third of those killed and wounded were children, the UN said. The report noted that about 60 percent of the civilian casualties were caused by the Taliban and other insurgents, and 19 percent by the Afghan government (the article didn't say who caused the rest – perhaps it wasn't clear who was responsible).

American War Reporter

Taliban Shuffle describes the experiences of a journalist for the Chicago Tribune who covered India, minimally, and Afghanistan and Pakistan in depth, starting in 2002. Barker apparently had much less close contact than Nawa did with Afghan women; as a war correspondent and political reporter, Barker mostly dealt with men.

At times, she was embedded in U.S. military units. She reported on the soldiers' frustrations, but I'm not sure whether she could see that being embedded in a fighting unit was ethically problematic.
Barker was brave, but she eventually realized that some of her courage was bravado that unnecessarily risked her own life and those of the Afghan men who worked for her. After the United States occupied Afghanistan, almost all the men who could speak English – doctors, engineers, and so on – wound up in jobs serving Americans as interpreters, drivers, guards, and “fixers” (people who found ways for the reporters to interview officials and fighters whom they otherwise had no access to), because they could earn so much more money that way than in their professions. That, in addition to the wars, cost Afghanistan a generation of professionals, Barker reports.

Barker met warlords and high government officials. Her description of then-president Hamid Karzai as ineffectual, and later connected with corrupt officials, is damning – and is omitted from the movie.
Both the book and the movie depict Western reporters and officials in Afghanistan as distanced from the people and steeped in alcohol to cope with the danger. That was all I learned from the movie.

Barker wrote that Pakistan is probably more dangerous than Afghanistan, and that the Pakistani Taliban is fiercer than the Afghan Taliban, and is likely connected with Pakistan's secret service.

Barker developed a sort of friendship with Nawaz Sharif, who was then a deposed prime minister and is now once again the prime minister of Pakistan. He helped her make contacts, but he also seemed bent on making her his mistress.

Barker witnessed the excitement in Pakistan when Benazir Bhutto returned and the chaos after her assassination. Nothing about Pakistan was in the movie - it didn't show her going there at all.

If you read the book, you'll learn as much about Pakistan as about Afghanistan. You'll come to understand, as Barker does, that Pakistan likely supports the Taliban in Afghanistan because India supports the current Afghan government.

Barker didn't decide on her own to leave Afghanistan, as the movie suggests. Instead, a media magnate who took over the Tribune and gutted its news department forced her to come back to the States. (It's grotesque that the movie showed this character as a moderately sympathetic woman instead of the obnoxious man that he was in the book.)

Barker quit her job and went back to Afghanistan on her own, to work on a book. She did finally leave, because she realized that she had become an adrenalin junkie, and needed to reclaim her life. Her personal life was somewhat different from what was portrayed in the movie – she didn't have an affair with the reporter who was kidnapped and certainly didn't blackmail an Afghan official into helping rescue him. But the toll that war reporting took on her personal life was great.

Most Afghans don't have the choice to leave the dangers, and Europe is trying to force those who have left to go back. Westerners who go there can try to recover from the stress. I can only imagine what toll the stress of war has taken on the people of Afghanistan. I should think the whole nation is suffering from PTSD.

It is extremely important to read Afghan women's accounts of their country. But an American woman's perspective also has its place, in showing what the egocentric, ethnocentric American presence there is like.

The U.S. government is still in Afghanistan, so we ought to care about what happens there, to say the least. We should support organizations that are building shelters (Women for Afghan Women) and organizations that are helping the refugees. And we should demand that Western nations like ours provide a decent life for these and other refugees.

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Best Books I Read in 2015

2/11/2016

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I want to share my favorite books of 2015. They weren't all published last year, but I read them then.

I read a number of books by women from and about Muslim countries so I could understand them better.
Nadia Hashimi, an Afghani-American physician who has visited Afghanistan, wrote a book that tells the story of a family that tries to flee Afghanistan after one of its members has been killed by the Taliban.

When the Moon is Low is narrated by a woman and her son. It tells of her life growing up in Afghanistan and how it became worse and worse. The family finally has little choice but to flee. And then they embark on a dangerous journey to join relatives in England. The book tells everything they go through, from humiliations to physical violence. The family struggles to stay together. A young child becomes ill from the deprivations of the journey. Europeans consider the older boy a threat just because he's an Afghan boy.

I can't recommend this book strongly enough.

Hashimi also has written an excellent novel about women living in Afghanistan, The Pearl That Broke Its Shell. It's about two related women who both live parts of their lives dressed in male clothing. One is a woman in the early 20th century who loses her family to illness and tries to find a way to survive. The other is a contemporary girl whose family has no son and decides to make her a bacha push, an honorary boy, so she can do things no girl can do, such as go out to buy groceries. She even goes to school. Then she grows older and is forced to marry. This book shows Afghanistan, from an old regime king's harem to the current parliament. It's the Afghanistan we Americans know all too little about.

I also read two books by Elif Shafak, a Turkish writer. I had earlier read and been impressed by The Bastard of Istanbul, a book she wrote that deals with relations between Turks and Armenians. The protagonist is an Armenian-American girl who reads about the early 20th century Turkish genocide of the Armenians, but goes to visit Turkey anyway and finds a surprising welcome in the family of her Turkish stepfather. A Turkish nationalist brought a lawsuit against Shafak for writing the book, but the case was dismissed.

This year I read Shafak's Honor and The Forty Rules of Love. Honor is the story of twin sisters; one stays in Turkey and learns what it is like to be a rare single woman there, while the other goes with her family in London. There are multiple narrators. It's not much of a spoiler to say the son has killed his mother in an "honor" killing because he is one of the narrators, speaking from an English prison. Islamists had egged him on to matricide. The Forty Rules of Love is about the life of the Sufi mystic and poet Rumi. I was a little bothered that Shafak insists that Rumi's love for another man couldn't have been physical, but otherwise it's a beautiful story.

I've already blogged about Pakistani author Kamila Shamsie's superb novels Burnt Shadows and A God in Every Stone (6/20/2015). But they are worth mentioning again. And again. Burnt Shadows begins with the atomic bomb dropping on Nagasaki. One of the main characters is Hiroto, a Japanese woman whose body was marked forever by the blast. Her German fiancé, Konrad, a man escaping the war in Europe who found himself in another country at war, is killed in Nagasaki. Disintegrated. Nothing left of him.

For a while, Hiroto works as a translator for the Americans occupying Japan. But when she hears them justify the atomic bomb attacks as “saving American lives” she can't bear to work with them any longer.

Tired of being stigmatized as a bomb survivor in her birth country, Hiroto goes to India and hopes to find a home. She marries a Muslim. Shamsie's description of colonial English life seems on target: balanced, but acute.

India was on the verge of partition (the time when Pakistan split off). Divisions between Hindus and Muslims sharpened and much blood was shed. Even Muslims who had no intention of leaving Delhi found themselves unwelcome there.

Shamsie tells how the characters rebuild their lives after partition. And then she tells of the descendants of the English and Pakistani families, and how they try to make sense of the world. Hiroto's outsider perspective is crucial.

The U.S. role in Afghanistan plays a large part in the story. Shamsie leaves the reader with a devastating picture of Americans.

A God in Every Stone provides an equally devastating picture of the English. The story begins on the eve of World War I. Major characters are a young Englishwoman who wants to be an archaeologist, a Turkish archaeologist, an Indian Muslim who fights with the English forces in Europe, and his younger brother. All are moving characters with lives full of pain. The book looks back to the ancient history of what is now Pakistan, especially Peshawar, and at what Peshawar has become: a refuge for Afghans fleeing their country and a point from which they launch attacks into it. She rejects stereotypes of Pashtuns, both Pakistanis and Afghans, as violent. She tells about the nonviolent movement among the Pashtuns that paralleled Gandhi's.

One character asks another, “And what do I need to know?” The other replies, “How to remove your blindfold and see your place in the world.” Shamsie demands that we all remove our blindfolds.

Rafia Zakaria's The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan is a novel-like memoir. Zakaria looks at political developments in Pakistan, particularly in Karachi, including discrimination against Muslims who came from India after partition. She also tells the moving story of her aunt, whose heart was broken when her husband took a second wife. It was uncommon for men to marry more than one woman in Pakistan's early days, but it became common as Islamization took more and more rights away from women.

Nazila Fathi, an Iranian journalist, wrote The Lonely War, a book explaining contemporary Iran. Her description of the uprising against the shah and the fundamentalist revolution startled me as I realized how much they resembled the Chinese and Russian revolutions. Intellectuals and members of the previous ruling class lost their jobs. Many were jailed. Many were killed. Moderates were purged. A new class rose up and gained education. Fathi says that Iran has an extensive new middle class that doesn't like fundamentalism but doesn't want to take risks to rock the boat. She faced danger for reporting and had to move abroad to keep out of prison.

Kader Abdolah, an Iranian man who also has to live abroad, participated in the overthrow of the shah and the subsequent revolution. His novel The King is about a nineteenth century shah, but the hero is his vizier, who tried to modernize Persia (the country still had that name then) by developing modern communications, transportation, and education. The shah had let the British exploit the country's resources without getting Persia anything in return except monies paid to himself. Russia and France also were poised to exploit Persia. Again, I was struck by the resemblance to China's struggles for modernization in that century—and by the similarity of the ways of living in the palace, with absolute rule and hundreds of concubines, with eunuchs to tend them. I learned that the progressives were able to enlist the mullahs to play a progressive role.

Ausmat Zehanat Khan, a Pakistani-Canadian, has written a mystery that is far more than a mystery: The Unquiet Dead. She tells the story of the horrific massacres of Bosnian Muslims by Serbs in the 1990s, and how many Serbs managed to escape punishment, some migrating to other countries, such as Canada. Really, Muslims have a great many reasons to be angry at the West. Her description of how Dutch UN peacemakers let massacres occur is particularly horrifying.

I also read Sandy Tolan's The Lemon Tree, a nonfiction book based on interviews with a Palestinian man whose family was forced out of its home in Israel and the Jewish Israeli woman whose family moved into his family's house. On meeting him, she tried to be his friend. The book seems to be a balanced account, or as balanced as anything could be, under the circumstances.

I can't tell about my 2015 reading without mentioning Peggy Faw Gish's eye-opening books on Iraq, Iraq: A Journey of Hope and Darkness and Walking Through Fire, books telling about her work as a Christian Peace Team member witnessing the second Iraq war and the U.S.-led occupation. I blogged about these books earlier (2/16/2015). They discuss how American peacemakers tried to prevent violence and worked on developing teams of Iraqi peacemakers. The books are unsettling in just the right way. They should move us to question everything.

Speaking of questioning everything, long-time radical feminist Kathleen Barry's book Unmaking War: Remaking Men questions war itself and urges men not to let themselves be brutalized and used as cannon fodder. I also wrote a blog about this book (4/19/2015).

Jenny Nordberg, an American journalist, wrote The Underground Girls of Kabul, which tells about girls in Afghanistan whose families raise them as boys so that there is at least an honorary boy in the family. There is a belief that having a bacha push, an honorary boy, will help the mother conceive a "real" boy. But those girls generally have to go on to arranged marriages. Nordberg tells about the lives of some of them, including one woman who became a parliamentary deputy (whose salary enabled her husband to take a second wife) and one lucky woman who manages to continue living in disguise.

There are many tragedies in the world, and the situation of North Koreans is among the worst. In her memoir, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom, Yeonmi Park tells of her life of oppression and starvation in North Korea. Her family could see a Chinese city across the river that was lit by electricity, a scarce community in North Korea. They heard that the Chinese had three meals of rice a day, which Yeonmi could scarcely believe. Like many others, Yeonmi and her mother escaped to China. But, also like many others, they discovered that the smugglers who "helped" them were human traffickers. They were prostituted for years, but finally managed to escape to South Korea via a grueling journey to Outer Mongolia. Then South Koreans looked down on them because they were so much less educated than South Koreans. But Yeonmi was brilliant and managed to learn English and many other things besides. She now lives in the United States. I was privileged to hear her read in person from her book and was glad to see that she can sometimes laugh as well as cry.

Nigerian writer Chinole Okparantha has written what is probably the first novel about being a lesbian in Nigeria, Under the Udala Tree. An Igbo who lived through the Biafra war, the narrator learns that she is attracted to girls. And that being lesbian or gay in Nigeria can be just as deadly as war.

Ghana Must Go, a novel by Nigeria writer Taiye Selasi, is the story of a Nigerian-Ghanaian family trying to live in the United States. They face discrimination, but the experiences some of the children have when they are sent to live with relatives in Ghana are even worse.

Just after the Charleston massacre last June, I read Sue Monk Kidd's The Invention of Wings, a novel about the abolitionist Grimke sisters and a fictional slave their family owned. I hadn't realized that Sarah and Angelina Grimke came from Charleston. They had great struggles as women. In the story, Sarah is denied the right to read her father's books and is not allowed to free Handful, the slave her parents give her. But the Grimke sisters' sufferings appear as nothing compared with Handful's, though Handful and her mother find ways to resist. The book also portrays Denmark Vesey, the leader of a rebellion, and the devastating white oppression, including rounding up black people in Mother Emmanuel AME Church.

Lynn Kantor's Her Own Vietnam is a novel about a young American nurse who joins the Army during the Vietnam War and is sent to tend soldiers on the front. The life is horrible and damages her. Kantor says the nurses' stories have not been told.

I did read some fantasy last year. Jo Walton's The Just City fascinated me. It's the story of what would happen if the Greek gods allowed philosophers to build a city based on Plato's Republic. If you recall, Plato's Republic categorizes people into gold, silver, and bronze categories and assigns them to work based on that. It also reduces sexual interactions to one-night stands with partners selected by the city's guardians. But in Walton's novel Socrates comes along and is a gadfly. It's astonishing that Plato ever thought Socrates would approve of such a city.

Nicola Griffith's Hild, the story of a Saxon girl living in the time when the Saxons were taking Britain from the Britons (ancestors of today's Welsh), is an interesting historical novel with some lesbian undertones, but a great deal of plotting and fighting. Hild has visions that bring her power in a society where women have little. Though there is some sex between women, I would not call this a lesbian book. The women who engage in sex apparently prefer men.

Jacqueline Winspear, who has written many fine mysteries about World War I, wrote a moving non-mystery novel about it, The Care and Management of Lies. It was especially striking to read about how pacifism was a crime.

I read all I can about Shakespeare. Tina Packer, a long-time Shakespearean scholar, director, and actor, wrote Women of Will, an excellent book about Shakespeare's female characters and how they differed at different points of his life. Packer suggests that they shaped Shakespeare as well as being shaped by him.

I also have great admiration for Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro, who wrote Contested Will, a book showing that questioning whether Shakespeare really wrote his plays did not begin until the 19th century, more than 200 years after he died. I recently read his The Year of Lear, a book describing the political situation in England in 1606, when Shakespeare wrote Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. Shapiro points out that the Gunpowder Plot, in which some Catholics tried to blow up King James I, his family, and all of Parliament, had just happened at the end of 1605. It was an anxious time, similar to the post-September 11, 2001 United States. Therefore, Shapiro says, plays about overthrowing monarchs felt relevant, perhaps excruciatingly relevant. Discrimination against Catholics increased after the plot, as discrimination against Muslims increased in the United States.

I read other books last year, but I recommend all of these. Happy reading to any who choose to read them.

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