Category Archives: Biography

Admissions

by Anna

By Kendra James

I first heard about this book during Kendra James’ very funny guest stint on my favorite podcast “Yo, Is This Racist.” I highly recommend the episode, both because the hosts are always very funny and smart and because the stories James tells from the book got me hooked (granted after a few months). It is a memoir of her experience as the first Black legacy student at Taft, a fancy prep school in Connecticut, and the whole thing was a real eye-opener for me. In the early 2000s with nascent internet and social media, her high school experience was wildly different than mine, and it was often hard to parse whether that was due to the time period, the quality of the school, or race. Regardless, she captures this moment in her life with such detail that I really felt like I was getting a clear look into a life much different than mine.

On the one hand, I never really understood prep schools, feeling that at this point, for better or worse, most high schools sort of vaguely aim their students toward college instead of trade apprenticeships. However, James reveals the extraordinarily high level of guidance students at Taft got when applying for colleges, which really hammered home the extra privilege that makes these students much more likely to go to prestigious colleges and universities. (It also made me mad all over again about the college admissions bribery scandal, since they already had such a leg up!)

On the other hand, she was one of a handful of Black students in an overwhelmingly white school (in an overwhelmingly white state), and of course that came with a fairly constant barrage of aggressions, both micro and not so small. James is so funny overall in her writing that it came as a surprise how difficult some parts are to read. She does an equally skilled job at unpacking the oversized responsibility that is piled on all the students of color, who are also still so young and just coming into awareness of themselves and the world around them.

What struck me hardest from James’ memoir was how acutely James and other students of color could distinguish between individual racism, which was often more blatant, and systemic racism, which though more subtle, could hurt them in much wider ways. This really gets at what many white people, myself included, often don’t see: some rando shouting the n-word is disgusting, but a centuries-old institution requiring the Black, Latinx, and Asian students to continuously prove their worth to both their peers and much of the faculty is much more lastingly harmful. James and her fellow students of color recognized that immediately, and I felt bad that it took me so long into adulthood to begin to see the same thing.

I also have to admit that I recognized more of myself than I would have liked in her ignorant white classmates. My own high school was also very white, and while I did not actively hold racist beliefs, I just went with the cultural flow, and the flow in the Texas public school system was most definitely racist. Admissions gives a clear, fairly universal, real world example why not being racist isn’t enough, and why we need to aim to be anti-racist instead.

I only found out in the acknowledgements (for some reason, I’ve started reading them dedicatedly, and it feels somehow very middle aged of me) that James first began to write about her experiences on our beloved defunct website, The Toast!

Good Talk by Mira Jacob

by Rebecca

Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations
by Mira Jacob
2019

This is a very good book. It’s made up of illustrated conversations that the author had with various people in her life — her young son, her aging parents, her brother, her friends, her boyfriends and girlfriends, her husband, her extended family, her in-laws — skipping backward and forward through time. It starts out cute and funny but with heart and then keeps going, right for the heart. It never loses the cute, but it gets pretty serious.

The author is a dark-skinned child of Indian immigrants, born and raised in New Mexico, who moved to NYC to become a writer. She lives in NYC, married to a Jewish man, and with a son just old enough to watch the news as Trump runs for election. The conversations address and illustrate a number of issues — racism and colorism, expectations and dreams, personal identity and political division — from a very personal perspective. The central theme of the book is how can she be honest with her child, preparing him for the world and raising him to be a good person, while also protecting him from the pain of a world that’s not going to be as kind to him as he deserves. In many ways, it reminds me of Coates’ Between the World and Me.

One of the real strengths of this book, that comes from Jacob’s use of dialogue, is how it presents these complex interactions without attempting to simplify or explain them. It’s all friends and family and lived experiences. As she explains to her son on page 85: “We’re in the middle place where sometimes we get treated badly and sometimes we do it to other people. But I mean, that’s not the end of the world, right? Knowing we’ve got room for improvement?” To which her young son Z replies: “I’d rather just be the good guys.” (Me, too, kid. Me, too.)

As the memoir of a living women still very much in her prime, this book doesn’t really come to any conclusions other than the need to continue on, trying to find a way to make the world better than it currently is and trust that loved ones can be better too. It ends with a kind of grim determination to keep trying.

Adventure Cats by Laura J. Moss

by Rebecca

Adventure Cats: Living Nine Lives to the Fullest
by Laura J. Moss
2017

This is a fun and inspiring book that I ran across at some point well after I’d already started taking my cat on walks with a halter and leash.* I thought to myself: this is a nonfiction book about adventure cats, my cat would definitely like to go on more adventures, so this might give me ideas.

And it did. Sort of. Maybe I’ll like outside adventures more if I have my cat with me. But as I’ve stated before, I find the concept of long walks a lot more interesting than the practice of it.

It turns out that I’m pretty much the exact opposite of the intended audience for this book. The intended audience is made up of adventurous people who are interested in seeing if they can get their cat involved in their lifestyle. My situation is that I am a standard couch-potato cat-owner who has stumbled across ownership of an adventure cat and now needs to figure out how to keep his life suitably enriched while also keeping him safe and me sane.

About half the book is made of short bios of various adventure cats and their people and what all is involved in their lifestyle. I adored these parts! So cute! There are cats who go hiking and camping and sailing and surfing and skiing and rock climbing and so much more. Awesome!

The other half of the book is focused on how-to instructions and lists of important information on how to safely go adventuring with a cat. It seems very useful and also highlighting that this is not my preferred method of relaxing or enjoying the world.

The directions on how to train a cat are also so slow and careful that it struck me as more of a deterrent than an inspiration to actually follow the method, but again: I’m not the audience of people who are adventurous and want a cat to match. I expect the written method is the correct way to train a cat, but my relationship with my cat is a lot more mutual training as I figure out how to accommodate his desires as much as I train him to accommodate mine.**

This book also ran into my standard pet peeve with pretty much all self-help books: they tend to talk to the reader with broad assertions (“you think”, “you feel”, “you respond”) that always make me feel particularly contrary (“you don’t know me!”), and I was getting that with this book as it simplified cat body language and responses in a way that was absolutely necessary for the scope of the book, but didn’t match my cat at all.***

A final warning: Every couple of pages this author uses a cutesy pun (being “purrpared”; anything being “pawsible”) and it’s way too cutesy for me.

Despite the various caveats, I do recommend this book. It is an inspiration to see about pushing the boundaries of what I do for my cat’s enrichment and maybe for my own enrichment too.

* As a kitten, my cat was extremely curious and completely fearless and had to be held back from stalking a flock of Canadian geese, and he doesn’t appear to have gained much sense of self-preservation since then.

** I didn’t have to lure my cat into liking the halter and leash: He wanted to go outside so I made wearing a halter and leash a condition of that, and it wasn’t so much leash training as it was compromise negotiation. If he came near the door, I would put the halter/leash on him, and he’d be allowed out. If he didn’t want the halter leash on him, then he shouldn’t come near the door as I was going out.

*** Yes, my cat got startled and poofed out with a full bottle-brush tail on a walk this weekend, but he also continued to explore and had absolutely no interest in returning to the safety of the house. Yes, at another point he froze absolutely still and then had to slowly approach and cautiously whack a fallen leaf like a dangerous enemy, but again, no interest in retreating to safety.

Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing

by Anna

By Lauren Hough

I first read Lauren Hough in her eye-opening expose of life as a “cable guy,” which is also where I learned that some people refuse to let service workers in their home use their bathrooms, and am now very explicit about inviting them to, if needed. I immediately followed her on twitter, where she is very smart and funny, and very occasionally mentions that she grew up in a cult. I’d always thought she meant it hyperbolically, like her family was very conservatively religious, but then she announced her book of essays which would cover growing up in the Children of God cult. I thought oh shit, and then immediately preordered straight from the publisher.

And, whew, this book has such a strong narrative flow that I couldn’t put it down, but then also my head was so full of thoughts and feelings that at the same time I wanted to take a moment to process them all. Each essay connects so seamlessly with the next that I also kept forgetting it wasn’t a single narrative and was slightly puzzled (though not bothered) by the jumps back and forth in chronology. While the essays are all autobiographical, they are sorted by themes rather than chronologically. So, there is some really interesting recursion, where Hough revisits the same events in different essays, reflecting on them in different ways. It feels like Hough is sharing her own recovery with us, circling closer to the trauma that came out of her upbringing, coming at it from different directions to make ultimate sense of the whole. It feels raw and personal in a way that I’m not sure I’ve read before.

Hough relates all of this in a matter-of-fact voice that reminded me a bit of the noir style of writing, actually. Like, the world can be a terrible place where terrible things happen, but individuals just do the best they can in the circumstances given them. And that, while systems and organizations are inevitably corrupt, the connections you make with other people can be life savers. It’s an odd combination of grim and comforting at the same time, and I love it in noir and I love it here.

Who Is Ana Mendieta? by Redfern & Caron

by Rebecca

Who Is Ana Mendieta?
by Christine Redfern & Caro Caron
introduction by Lucy R. Lippard
2011

This is a relatively short but extremely full and dense graphic novel. It’s a biography of an artist, but also a window into an artistic movement, and also a true crime tragedy, and also a demonstration of how systemic prejudice works to keep a whole demographic down. The particular art styles of both the book and the art movement that it describes are not ones that I particularly enjoy (a lot of shock value and intentionally disturbing imagery), and yet, I still highly recommend the book. It was a reminder to me of what second-wave feminism was trying to accomplish and the context it was working in.

Ana Mendieta was born in 1948 in Havana, Cuba, moved to the US in 1961, and died violently in 1985 (her husband was indicted for murder three times by a jury, and acquitted three times by a judge who then sealed the records.) During her life, Mendieta was a rising star in the art world and making waves. But the book also points out that she, like so many women before her, had to be their own firsts, breaking the glass ceiling, not because there hadn’t been women before her, but because the existence of those women was and is so regularly denied. This book itself is an effort to not have Ana Mendieta suffer the same fate, not just of death but of being quietly brushed aside, leaving art history to continue as a history of male artists.

So all of this to say: this book is educational, distasteful, enraging, and important.

Here For It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America

by Anna

By R. Eric Thomas

Here_For_ItWhew, this book! I’m a big fan of R. Eric Thomas’ weekly e-newsletter,* and figured this would be a similar collection of essays: a combination of very funny personal anecdotes and political/social commentary. And it was, but just…even better: deeper, more complex, shockingly poignant. I was in awe of how he balanced humor and gravity, and how artistically he threaded themes through his personal life into reflections of our country as a whole.

One sentence, I’ll be laughing out loud, and the next will stop me short:

“The fact that I sometimes enjoyed dating a boy was, to say the least, discomfirming information for a Christian, black-esque straight person who spent his free time carefully curating an Audra McDonald fan page on the internet. And it didn’t feel like there were two sides of me fighting for dominance; it felt like I was coming apart at some basic level, like I was becoming diffuse, like water becomes mist.”

… “like water becomes mist.” Whew!

Thomas has had hard times, as he struggled with what it meant to be black, gay, and deeply Christian in America, but he finds such reflective truths and ultimate optimism that it was an ideal read right now. In his introduction, Thomas talks about his childhood love for Sesame Street’s The Monster At the End of This Book. It’s a funny, light-hearted critique of a children’s book through the retrospective adult lens. By the end, he ties this all into how difficult life seems now, but how important it is to forge ahead (as a very skilled professional writer, he of course does this much more meaningfully than I can). The title of his book comes from his conclusion that he is “here for it,” it being his life, with all its ups and downs, and that is how you save your soul in America.

*I have to plug his analysis of Governor Cuomo’s covid-themed poster, which had me howling!

You Can’t Touch My Hair

by Anna

By Phoebe Robinson

You_Can't_Touch_My_HairI decided to take a break from reading serious intellectual books about race and racism, and instead turn to a funny book about race and racism! And honestly, comedian Phoebe Robinson touches on many of the points from So You Want to Talk About Race and White Fragility through humor, pop culture, and personal anecdotes, so I really recommend this to anyone who wants to laugh while they learn some hard truths. Actually, I just recommend this to anyone, since Robinson is a very smart and funny writer on a whole range of topics:

  • Do you want to know which Hall & Oats lyrics summarize the entirety of human history?
  • Do you want detailed advice on how to correctly google yourself?
  • How to avoid being the Black Friend? (or conversely and more importantly, how to avoid tokenizing a friend as your Black Friend)

She kicks the book off right away with her titular hair: how her hair, society’s reactions to it, and the affect those reactions had on her evolved over her youth and young adulthood, culminating in a history of black hair in media which illustrates the decades it took for natural black hair to be even slightly accepted today.

For me, one of the most striking stories she tells is about a director she worked with, which quite literally runs down all the hallmarks of white fragility like a checklist: denial of racist words, reassurance of being a good person, burdensome guilt-ridden apology and request to ‘talk it out further,’ and the final cherry on top of turning to a different black person for absolution. It should seriously be used as the prime example in DiAngelo’s book!

My favorite part of the book, however, was toward the end where she writes a series of letters of ‘advice’ to her “all-time favorite person: my two-and-a-half-year-old biracial niece, Olivia.” As a professional comedian, of course she’s funny, but she really shines when she’s also sincere: “Seeing how you view the world makes me happy. Ah! A comedian expressing a genuine emotion and not following it with a joke. Full disclosure: That was really, really hard for me to do just then.”

In addition to wanting to make sure Olivia doesn’t miss such pop culture gems as DMX singing “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” she tells her how great it is to be black, to be a woman, and even tags in John Hodgman for the difficult task of talking up being white without sounding racist! (You’re going to want to read the story of John taking his friend Wyatt—who I assume is Wyatt Cenac—to a gourmet mayonnaise shop in Brooklyn.)

And finally, in her advice on being sex-positive, she goes on a lengthy tangent about the problematic 2014 movie Kingsman: The Secret Service, which first of all, shocked me about that movie since I’d never seen it, but then made me want to read an entire book of her dissecting what does and does not work in movies and tv shows. This book is so chock full of pop culture references that I finally just had to appreciate the ones that I got and let the rest pass, or I would have been constantly jumping over to google.

Reading Through the Pandemic

by Kinsey

So, it’s been a while. 2020, huh? I may have aged 20 years since February. Everyone hanging in there?

While I have definitely spent my share of this pandemic doom-scrolling, playing a truly astounding amount of Thirteen, and watching every episode of the Great British Baking Show again, I have actually read a fair amount. My book list from the last five months is an odd mix of romance, non-fiction, and literary best sellers as I keep trying different kind of books, looking for the perfect thing to help me either forget the world or understand what is going on around me. I don’t know that I have yet to find a book that genuinely helped on either front, but I did read some smart, touching, fun things that kept me off Twitter. It’s all I’ve got today, but I’m going to offer it to you: some books that might take you away from the current hellscape for a few minutes.

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips
A while back I read Reservoir 13, a novel about how the disappearance of a young girl affects the residents of a small town. It got rave reviews, but I found it deeply unsatisfying. This book is everything I had hoped Reservoir 13 would be. I also really enjoyed a peek inside life in a far-flung Russian province, including in its indigenous communities.

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
People absolutely adore Morgenstern’s first book, The Night Circus, but I thought it was just pleasant enough and Anna was even less impressed. But it’s a pandemic, I’ve got nothing but time, so I thought I as might as well tackle her second one. It’s another long, sprawling magical realism story with lots of characters and multiple time frames, but I was much more caught up in the characters and the magical world she created this time around.

The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
I made so much fun of Anna for reading this at the beach a few years ago, but she was totally right! This is a smart, readable book that provides a sense of hope that there are concrete things we can do to improve the world.

Open Book by Jessica Simpson
I know! The Jessica Simpson book! It is actually very good!

The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey
Massey wrote a series of mystery novels about a Japanese-American woman solving crimes in modern-day Tokyo, which I liked a lot, but this book kicked of an even more interesting new series about a female lawyer working in 1920s Bombay. The story was interesting, but I was most impressed with the level of research that Massey must have done, which allowed her to create this world that felt so real, even while being so far from anything I’m familiar with.

Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch
Have you been wanting to read a linguist discuss how people on the Internet communicate? You want to, whether you know it or not. This can get a little dense at times, but McCulloch is funny and the phenomena she describes will be familiar to anyone who has spent significant time on line over the last 25 years. Having an expert take a specific Internet language thing (a meme, an acronym, ellipses) and then explain exactly what purpose it serves actually gave me a lot of respect for how we create the forms of communications we need in real time every day.

The Alice Network by Kate Quinn
This last one isn’t cheerful, I’ll warn you, but it was compelling. I think I found this book in a round-up of WWII stories, but it actually has an interesting twist. The story follows two timelines–a female spy in France during the first World War, and then a young American girl in Europe in the years immediately following the end of the second war. Anyone who reads a lot of historical fiction ends up reading a lot of WWII stories, and that’s all fine, but they often focus exclusively on the war years and little before or after. I liked how Quinn’s story showed how close and connected the wars, and individuals’ experiences of them, were and how Europe had begun to rebuild in the late 1940s.

Medallion Status

by Anna

By John Hodgman

Medallion_StatusI’ve been listening to a lot of the Judge John Hodgman podcast at work, since it is very soothing. Two funny, smart hosts (Judge John Hodgman and Bailiff Jesse Thorn) adjudicate cases of very little significance. In one of my recent favorites, a husband “sues” his wife to prevent her from getting a worm-based compost bin in their apartment, and it is hilarious, hilariously gross, and charming. In this episode, as per usual, Hodgman charmingly gets at the base issue and finds a solution that leaves both parties extremely pleased, and it is so refreshing.

While mired halfway through Smoke, I put a hold on Medallion Status, figuring it would be the perfect fluffy palette cleanser. And I was 100% correct! While I know Hodgman best from his guest appearances as the deranged billionaire on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, he is most generally well known as the PC in the old Apple ads. He is the first to acknowledge that was the height of his fame, too. With the ads came more regular roles on television shows, and a gold medallion status on his airline of choice.

In Medallion Status, he reflects surprisingly poignantly on the weirdness, seductiveness, and elusiveness of even relatively minor fame. It is also so consistently funny; I was giggling out loud every few minutes in what I’m sure was a very annoying manner. His writing is so deceptively simple that over and over again I would be caught off guard with just how funny it was.

Nice Try: Stories of Best Intentions and Mixed Results

By Josh Gondelman

Nice_TryWhile I’m talking about funny, kind white men, I also have to recommend Josh Gondelman and his collection of personal stories, Nice Try. He is an incredibly funny comedian – his standup album “Physical Whisper” is one of my favorites – and is frequently referred to as the nicest guy in comedy (thus the title of his book). And he is super nice! His comedy is self-deprecating, but also wildly relatable, about trying your best to navigate increasingly complicated life while feeling like you might be missing some key tools.

The book collects stories his written for other publications and additional personal stories. In one chapter, he talks about struggling with his growing awareness of how problematic the NFL is, both physically and socially, with how love for the game was an important way to bond with his family (this also led him to co-create #agoodgame, tying points scored to donations). In another he talks about adopting a dog that may or may not have been stolen from its original owner, and figuring out what to do about that, with the same amount of maturity and savvy as any of the rest of us (i.e., none). It’s all very funny in a way that is laughing with, not at, all of us about how ridiculous life can be sometimes.

Harriet Tubman by Catherine Clinton

by Rebecca

HarrietTubmanHarriet Tubman: The road to freedom
by Catherine Clinton, 2004
read by Shayna Small, 2017

I put a hold on this book as soon as I returned from the theatre after watching Harriet, the movie, because it was an amazingly good movie and I wanted to know more about the history. Also because I wanted to know if the theme of Joan of Arc parallels was unique to the movie. As it turns out: no, the similarities were acknowledged during her lifetime.

I highly recommend this book.

Also, the audiobook version picked an excellent voice to read the book: clear spoken and academic but with a hint of a southern accent.

And that really typifies the book: it’s an academic biography of Harriet Tubman that addresses where the evidence and documentation comes from and where the holes in that evidence are and why, in a very direct and personable manner. We don’t know what year she was born because there’s no birth certificate and a possible ten year span. There’s a lot we don’t know about the Underground Railroad because anyone keeping records at the time would have been keeping records of their own criminal activity. Tubman struggled to get any sort of payment from the government for her services in the civil war because, despite being at that point a well-known celebrity, the bureaucracy demanded documentation that didn’t always exist. And the implications for how these issues effected other African-Americans is staggering because Harriet Tubman was well-known, well-respected, and well-remembered by highly ranked military personnel.

Apparently during the civil war there was a third category of African-Americans that I had never heard of before: Contraband. These weren’t free blacks or slaves, these were “contraband” who had been confiscated and/or escaped from their masters but were still considered possessions rather than people in the eyes of the law. The whole thing really highlights how insane the slave era was, (and how insane the white supremacy era continues to be.)

Anyway, Harriet Tubman was amazing and doing her best as she could, and her life is an example of: do what you can, when you can, and you can move mountains… but there will always be more to do.

But also, risking your life to change the world doesn’t always end with death, even for someone so similar to Joan of Arc: Harriet Tubman Davis died free, of old age, in a house she owned, surrounded by family, as a cherished and celebrated member of her community.