Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs & the Police Killing That Galvanized New York City by LaShawn Harris

Hello my lovely readers! It's been a slow reading month compared to how fast I was reading over the summer. Some books have taken me longer to read than others, like this one. Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS
On October 29, 1984, 66-year-old beloved Black disabled grandmother Eleanor Bumpurs was murdered in her own home. A public housing tenant 4 months behind on rent, Ms. Bumpurs was facing eviction when white NYPD officer Stephen Sullivan shot her twice with a 12-gauge shotgun. LaShawn Harris, 10 years old at the time, felt the aftershocks of the tragedy in her community well beyond the four walls of her home across the street.

Now an award-winning historian, Harris uses eyewitness accounts, legal documents, civil rights pamphlets, and more to look through the lens of her childhood neighbor's life and death. She renders in a new light the history of anti-Black police violence and of the watershed anti-policing movement Eleanor Bumpurs's murder birthed.

So many Black women's lives have been stolen since—Deborah Danner, Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, Sonya Massey—and still more are on the line. This deeply researched, intimate portrait of Eleanor Bumpurs's life and legacy highlights how one Black grandmother’s brutal police murder galvanized an entire city. It also shows how possible and critical it is to stand together against racist policing now.

Hometown Betrayal by Emily Benedek

Hello my lovely readers! It's been a while. Unfortunately, I had some health issues shortly after my last review and I just couldn't handle writing reviews.

I have read a lot of books though, but they were all...meh. Stay tuned for another "Quick Reviews!"

Now let's get into this book!

SYNOPSIS
No one believed it could happen in their town.

Valarie Clark Miller seemed to have it all. Smart, beautiful, and athletic, with a wealthy, successful husband and growing family, Valarie appeared to be the picture-perfect Mormon wife. But it was all a façade. Inside, she was crumbling from the pressures of long-repressed memories of a childhood plagued with sexual and physical abuse.

In Hometown Betrayal, author Emily Benedek brings you behind the closed doors of the remote Mormon community of Clarkston, Utah. With the help of hundreds of individual stories, she pieces together not only what happened to Valarie, but also the conditions and culture that allowed it. Hometown Betrayal culminates in an account of the Miller family’s fight to hold accountable the men—including the local cop-- who abused Valarie and controlled the systems designed to look the other way.

Mornings in Jenin by Susan Albuhawa

Hello my lovely readers! I'm definitely finding my niche with fiction that I like to read and I think it comes down to international or Black American historical fiction or off-beat literary fiction. Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS
In the refugee camp of Jenin, Amal is born into a world of loss—of home, country, and heritage. Her Palestinian family was driven from their ancestral village by the newly formed state of Israel in 1948. As the villagers fled that day, Amal's older brother, just a baby, was stolen away by an Israeli soldier. In Jenin, the adults subsist on memories, waiting to return to the homes they love. Amal's mother has walled away her heart with grief, and her father labors all day. But in the fleeting peacefulness of dawn, he reads to his young daughter daily, and she can feel his love for her, "as big as the ocean and all its fishes." On those quiet mornings, they dream together of a brighter future.

This is Amal's story, the story of one family's struggle and survival through over sixty years of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, carrying us from Jenin to Jerusalem, to Lebanon and the anonymity of America. It is a story shaped by scars and fear, but also by the transformative intimacy of marriage and the fierce protectiveness of motherhood. It is a story of faith, forgiveness, and life-sustaining love.

Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler by Susana M. Morris

 

Hello my lovely readers! This biography came out on Tuesday, I got a Libby copy of it on Wednesday and I'm already finished! Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS

As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish in the field of science fiction, Octavia Butler was a trailblazer. With her deft pen, she created stories speculating the devolution of the American empire, using it as an apt metaphor for the best and worst of humanity—our innovation and ingenuity, our naked greed and ambition, our propensity for violence and hierarchy. Her fiction charts the rise and fall of the American project—the nation’s transformation from a provincial backwater to a capitalist juggernaut—made possible by chattel slavery—to a bloated imperialist superpower on the verge of implosion.

In this outstanding work, Susana M. Morris places Butler’s story firmly within the cultural, social, and historical context that shaped her the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, women’s liberation, queer rights, Reaganomics. Morris reveals how these influences profoundly impacted Butler’s personal and intellectual trajectory and shaped the ideas central to her writing. Her cautionary tales warn us about succumbing to fascism, gender-based violence, and climate chaos while offering alternate paradigms to religion, family, and understanding our relationships to ourselves. Butler envisioned futures with Black women at the center, raising our awareness of how those who are often dismissed have the knowledge to shift the landscape of our world. But her characters are no magical martyrs, they are tough, flawed, intelligent, and complicated, a reflection of Butler’s stories.

Morris explains what drove She wrote because she felt she must. “Who was I anyway? Why should anyone pay attention to what I had to say? Did I have anything to say? I was writing science fiction and fantasy, for God’s sake. At that time nearly all professional science-fiction writers were white men. As much as I loved science fiction and fantasy, what was I doing? Well, whatever it was, I couldn’t stop. Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It’s about not being able to stop at all.”

Independence by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Hello my lovely readers! Indian fiction....let's get into it!

SYNOPSIS
India, 1947. In a rural village in Bengal live three sisters, daughters of a well-respected doctor.

Priya: intelligent and idealistic, resolved to follow in her father's footsteps and become a doctor, though society frowns on it.

Deepa: the beauty, determined to make a marriage that will bring her family joy and status.

Jamini: devout, sharp-eyed, and a talented quiltmaker, with deeper passions than she reveals.

Theirs is a home of love and safety, a refuge from the violent events taking shape in the nation. Then their father is killed during a riot, and even their neighbors turn against them, bringing the events of their country closer to home.

As Priya determinedly pursues her career goal, Deepa falls deeply in love with a Muslim, causing her to break with her family. And Jamini attempts to hold her family together, even as she secretly longs for her sister's fiancé.

When the partition of India is officially decided, a drastic--and dangerous--change is in the air. India is now for Hindus, Pakistan for Muslims. The sisters find themselves separated from one another, each on different paths. They fear for what will happen to not just themselves, but each other.

QUICK REVIEWS PT II

 Hello my lovely readers!

I think I'll make these "quick reviews" a regular occurrence, here on Naomi's Bookshelf.   Here's another four books that I read over the past few weeks, but didn't feel like giving a full review. Let's get into it!

You Didn't Hear This From Me (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip by Kelsey McKinney
This collection of essays explores the "murkiness" of everyday storytelling, why it feels so good to gossip, it's religious implications and how gossip shaped pop culture...or vice versa.  It covers everything from the history of gossip to how it's portrayed in the media.

* Going into this, I didn't know it was a collection of essays. Essay collections aren't particularly my favorite genre, however this was a fine audiobook. I thought it was a bit too current for my liking. Even though most of what the author talked about was from 20 years ago (Mean Girls, Britney Spears breakdown etc), it felt like it all happened yesterday. I would've appreciated a wider range of essays talking about gossip from a longer period of time and a more worldly reach. 3.5 out of 5 stars

Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird by Gene Andrew Jarrett

Hello my lovely readers! This book is an example of what I look for in biographies. Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS
A major poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) was one of the first African American writers to garner international recognition in the wake of emancipation. In this definitive biography, the first full-scale life of Dunbar in half a century, Gene Andrew Jarrett offers a revelatory account of a writer whose Gilded Age celebrity as the "poet laureate of his race" hid the private struggles of a man who, in the words of his famous poem, felt like a "caged bird" that sings.

Jarrett tells the fascinating story of how Dunbar, born during Reconstruction to formerly enslaved parents, excelled against all odds to become an accomplished and versatile artist. A prolific and successful poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and Broadway librettist, he was also a friend of such luminaries as Frederick Douglass and Orville and Wilbur Wright. But while audiences across the United States and Europe flocked to enjoy his literary readings, Dunbar privately bemoaned shouldering the burden of race and catering to minstrel stereotypes to earn fame and money. Inspired by his parents' survival of slavery, but also agitated by a turbulent public marriage, beholden to influential benefactors, and helpless against his widely reported bouts of tuberculosis and alcoholism, he came to regard his racial notoriety as a curse as well as a blessing before dying at the age of only thirty-three.