QUICK REVIEWS pt XVII

Hello my lovely readers! More quick reviews?? Yup! 

Little Faith by Nickolas Butler
A Wisconsin family grapples with the power and limitations of faith when their adopted daughter falls under the influence of a radical church.

*This was alright. I liked that this featured an elderly narrator, but the story fell short for me. I wanted a bit more drama. 3 out of 5 stars.

Every Story is a Love Story by Imobolo Mbue
Three years ago, Wolo’s pregnant wife was killed in a tragic car accident. In an instant, the great love of his life was gone, and so was their beautiful future: the twins they were expecting, the PhD she was on the cusp of finishing, and the house they’d just bought in New Jersey. Now the woman who killed his wife comes to Wolo asking for forgiveness.

*Sigh. I enjoyed Mbue's last novel Behold the Dreamer but I felt it could've done without a certain storyline with the wife. I felt the same way with this book. A rape storyline and a romance angle? Meh. Mbue is a solid writer, but this novel disappointed me. 3 out 5 stars.

One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Åsne Seierstad

 

Hello my lovely readers! I'm so glad I found the time to read this book! I'd picked it up back in May but it was due before I could delve into it. Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS
On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb outside the Norwegian prime minister's office in central Oslo, killing eight people. He then proceeded to a youth camp on the wooded island of Ut ya, where he killed sixty-nine more, most of them teenage members of the country's governing Labour Party. In One of Us, the journalist Asne Seierstad tells the story of this terrible day and its reverberations. How did Breivik, a gifted child from an affluent neighborhood in Oslo, become Europe's most reviled terrorist? How did he accomplish an astonishing one-man murder spree? And how did a famously peaceful and prosperous country cope with the slaughter of so many of its young?

QUICK REVIEWS pt. XIV

 Hello my lovely readers!

After a slowwwww August, I've been reading, reading, reading! Here's some quick reviews (already!) Let's get into it.

Radical Relations: Lesbian Mothers, Gay Fathers and their Children since WWII by Daniel Rivers
Beginning in the postwar era, a period marked by both intense repression and dynamic change for lesbians and gay men, Rivers argues that by forging new kinds of family and childrearing relations, gay and lesbian parents have successfully challenged legal and cultural definitions of family as heterosexual.

*This was super informative and opened by eyes to a part of U.S. history that I knew nothing about. I do wish that it followed a few families all the way through from the initial coming out to where they and their children are now. 3 out of 5 stars.

Just to Be With You by Sheryl Lister
Terrence "Monte" Campbell has been hurt by women seeking his wealth and celebrity instead of the man he truly is. So music is his only passion, until he meets Janae. He struggles to maintain emotional distance, but her tender sensuality and caring ways tempt Terrence as no other before. And one sizzling night, they both give in to their desires and explore all of the erotic promises between them. Is Janae really the one for Terrence, or just another disappointment waiting to happen?

*This book was a complete waste of my time. Thank goodness I finished it quickly! It was repetitive, had no buildup, the pace was incredibly rushed and the characters all sounded the same. 2 out of 5 stars.

Up All Night: A World History of Nightlife by Imogen Willetts

Hello my lovely readers! This was a fun read! Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS
There is a specific energy to a Saturday night. Cafés and shops close their shutters. Market traders dismantle their wares. “The air begins to tingle”, as John Dos Passos wrote about ’20s New York. “If you drink enough, talk enough, walk far enough, the train of magical events will begin.”

Nightlife began in the 17th century, when Edo and London built commercial environments designed for after-dark hedonism. Since then, nightlife has been at the frontier of popular culture and self-expression. It has defined cities and generations, bred moral panics and iconic countercultures, and gone from demimonde to global phenomenon, yet its sweeping history has been left untold.

Up All Night provides a guided tour of history’s most captivating nights out—from the luxurious pleasure quarters of samurai-era Japan to the saloons of turn-of-the-century New Orleans and the speakeasies of twenties Harlem. Whisking readers through underground dives, mega-clubs, raves and experimental cabarets, cultural historian Imogen Willetts takes us behind the velvet rope of history's hottest nightspots to show how they changed the world around us.

"I Can't Wait to Call You My Wife": African American Letters of Love, Marriage, and Family in the Civil War Era by Rita Roberts

 

Hello my lovely readers! This book was sitting on my shelf for years and I'd been dying to get to it. I finally read it and my heart swooned. Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS
Amidst bloody battles and political maneuvering, thousands of African Americans spent the Civil War trying to hold their families together. This moving book illuminates that struggle through the letters they exchanged. Despite harsh laws against literacy and brutal practices that broke apart Black families, people found ways to write to each other against all odds. In these pages, readers will meet parents who are losing hope of ever seeing their children again and a husband who walks fifteen miles to visit his wife, enslaved on a different plantation.

The collection also includes tender courtship letters exchanged between Lewis Henry Douglass and Helen Amelia Loguen, both children of noted abolitionists, and letters sent home by the young women who traveled south to teach literacy to escaped slaves. Roberts' expert curation allows readers to see the wider historical context. The transcriptions are accompanied by reproductions of selected original letters and photographs of the letter writers.

Black Folk Could Fly by Randall Kenan

Hello my lovely readers! Another day, another Randall Kenan book! Let's get into it. 

SYNOPSIS
"Rich in identity," as he described himself, Randall Kenan wrote widely and profoundly about what it meant to be Black, gay, and Southern. He confessed himself "elusive"--yet revealed himself in astonishing prose--memories of his three mothers (especially Mama, his great-aunt); recollections of his boyhood fear of snakes and his rapture in books; his sensual evocations of tobacco picking and hogkilling, butterbeans and scuppernongs, of the eastern North Carolina lowlands where he grew up. Here too is his intellectual coming-of-age: his passion for science fiction; his informed and ecstatic appreciations of James Baldwin, Ingmar Bergman, Gordon Parks, and Eartha Kitt; his grappling with the politics and meaning of race (a fiction) and home (an inescapable, visceral reality).

This powerful collection is a testament to a polymathic mind, a wise soul, and a sublimely gifted writer from whom readers will always wish to have more to read.

The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria's Romance Scammers by Carlos Barragán

 

Hello my lovely readers! Back at it again with another review! Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS
Ikotun, one of Lagos’s poorest neighborhoods, lies ten miles and a world away from the towers and beaches at the heart of Nigeria’s megacity. By day, the market vibrates with the sound of traders hawking their wares. By night, thousands of workers of another kind begin their shifts in bars and crumbling apartments: these are the Yahoo Boys.

Mostly men in their teens and twenties, many turning to drugs to stay awake as they chat with “clients” overseas, the Yahoo Boys are online romance scammers. Whether impersonating male celebrities or anonymous young women, each year they catfish millions of dollars from victims. Some have attained the status of folk heroes, while thousands more “cash out” only to lose it all.

Inspired by his mother’s own brush with a scammer, the journalist Carlos Barragán takes us on a journey to understand the lives of the Yahoo Boys of Ikotun. We meet Biggy and Chibuike, each struggling with the temptations of fast money; Azeez, a tailor’s apprentice caught between the lure of crime and Nigeria’s economic crisis; and Richie, who is convinced that he’s responsible for the death of a woman in Kentucky he manipulated online for years.

Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery by Heather Andrea Williams

Hello my lovely readers! This has been on my shelf FOREVER and I finally got to it. Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS
After the Civil War, African Americans placed poignant information wanted advertisements in newspapers, searching for missing family members. Inspired by the power of these ads, Heather Andrea Williams uses slave narratives, letters, interviews, public records, and diaries to guide readers back to devastating moments of family separation during slavery when people were sold away from parents, siblings, spouses, and children. Williams explores the heartbreaking stories of separation and the long, usually unsuccessful journeys toward reunification. Examining the interior lives of the enslaved and freedpeople as they tried to come to terms with great loss, Williams grounds their grief, fear, anger, longing, frustration, and hope in the history of American slavery and the domestic slave trade.

Williams follows those who were separated, chronicles their searches, and documents the rare experience of reunion. She also explores the sympathy, indifference, hostility, or empathy expressed by whites about sundered black families. Williams shows how searches for family members in the post-Civil War era continue to reverberate in African American culture in the ongoing search for family history and connection across generations.

QUICK REVIEWS pt. X

 A Most Tolerant Little Town by Rachel Louise Martin
The desegregation of Clinton High School in Clinton, Tennessee in 1956 by 12 Black students starts off mildly at first. Then the arrival of out of town pro-segregationists leads to violence, riots and eventually the bombing of the school.

*Good story about a little known Civil Rights history. I felt so bad for the students affected by the shenanigans that ensued. I'm glad that the author didn't censor word nigger throughout her book, but the audiobook version bleeped it out...even when it was read by a Black woman. Strange. 4 out of 5 stars.

Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker
Two people living centuries apart in the same home, discover a door between their worlds. One of these people is a ghost and one of their stories about murder is a lie. 

*This was OK. I was kind of lost with the Japanese mythology, but it was still a fine novel. It also was a bit convoluted at times. 3 out of 5 stars.

QUICK REVIEWS PT. IX

 Hello my lovely readers! It's time for some more quick reviews! Lets get into it.

The Finalist by Joan Long
Five authors each with their own secrets, are chosen to complete a deceased novelist’s unfinished manuscript on a remote island as part of a one million dollar contest. But then someone dies and accusations fly.

*Meh. It was entertaining enough. A simple vacation or beach read, but it felt pretty thin. 3 out of 5 stars

Strange People on the Hill by Michael Edison Hayden
A gripping story that reveals what happened to a small American town when an influential white nationalist group relocated its headquarters there, illustrating how radical changes in American politics impact our psyches and divide our communities.

*Too much of a memoir with random bits on Berkeley Springs sprinkled throughout it. Also, way too heavy on the social media aspect of everything. I feel as though there's a way to talk about how residents thought/felt without reducing it to social media fights. 2 out of 5 stars

London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth by Patrick Radden Keefe

 

Hello my lovely readers! Patrick Radden Keefe never misses. Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS

In the early morning of November 29th, 2019, surveillance cameras at the headquarters of MI6, Britain’s spy agency, captured video of a young man pacing back and forth on a high balcony of Riverwalk, a luxury tower on the bank of the river Thames. At 2:24 a.m., he jumped into the river.

In a quiet London neighborhood several miles away, Rachelle Brettler was worried about her son. Zac had told her that he had gone to stay with a friend, but then he did not come home. Days later, a police car pulled up and two officers relayed the dreadful news: her son was dead.

In their unbearable grief, Rachelle and her husband, Matthew, struggled to understand what had happened to Zac. He had his troubles, but in no way seemed suicidal. As they would soon discover, however, there was a lot they did not know about their son. Only after his death did they learn that he had adopted a fictitious alter-ego: Zac Ismailov, son of a Russian oligarch and heir to a great fortune. Under this guise, Zac had become entangled with a slippery London businessman named Akbar Shamji, and a murderous gangster known as “Indian Dave.” As the Brettlers set about investigating their son’s death, they were pulled into a different and more dangerous London than the one they’d always known, and came to believe that something much more nefarious than a suicide had claimed Zac’s life. But to their immense frustration, Scotland Yard seemed unable—or unwilling—to bring the perpetrators to justice.

Forbidden Fruit: Love Stories from The Underground Railroad by Betty DeRamus

Hello my lovely readers! This has been on my shelf for a while and I'm glad I finally picked it up! Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS
Forbidden Fruit is a collection of fascinating, largely untold tales of ordinary men and women who faced mobs, bloodhounds, bounty hunters, and bullets to be together -- and defy a system that categorized blacks not only as servants, but as property.

Here you'll meet, among other extraordinary characters, a fugitive slave from Virginia who spends seventeen years searching for his wife. A Georgia slave couple that sails for England with federal troops trailing behind. A white woman who falls in love with her deceased husband's slave. A young slave girl who is delivered to her fianc inside a wooden chest.

Acclaimed journalist Betty DeRamus gleaned these anecdotes from descendants of runaway slave couples, unpublished memoirs, Civil War records, census data, magazines, and dozens of previously untapped sources. This is a book about people pursuing love and achievement in a time of hate and severely limited opportunities. Though not all of the stories in Forbidden Fruit end in triumph, they all celebrate hope, passion, courage, and triumph of the human spirit.

The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation by Anna Malaika Tubbs

Hello my lovely readers! You know, I had a planned TBR for this year regarding biographies as part of the 12 Lives Challenge but I've only read one off my list. Funnily enough, I've read three separate biographies this year. I should probably just add them to my challenge because this biography was fantastic. Let's get into it!

SYNOPSIS
Much has been written about Berdis Baldwin's son James, about Alberta King's son Martin Luther, and Louise Little's son Malcolm. But virtually nothing has been said about the extraordinary women who raised them, who were all born at the beginning of the 20th century and forced to contend with the prejudices of Jim Crow as Black women.

Berdis, Alberta, and Louise passed their knowledge to their children with the hope of helping them to survive in a society that would deny their humanity from the very beginning--from Louise teaching her children about their activist roots, to Berdis encouraging James to express himself through writing, to Alberta basing all of her lessons in faith and social justice. These women used their strength and motherhood to push their children toward greatness, all with a conviction that every human being deserves dignity and respect despite the rampant discrimination they faced.

These three mothers taught resistance and a fundamental belief in the worth of Black people to their sons, even when these beliefs flew in the face of America's racist practices and led to ramifications for all three families' safety. The fight for equal justice and dignity came above all else for the three mothers.

These women, their similarities and differences, as individuals and as mothers, represent a piece of history left untold and a celebration of Black motherhood long overdue.

QUICK REVIEWS PT. VIII

Hello my lovely readers! It's time for another round of quick reviews! Let's get into it.

Good People by Patmeena Sabit
The Sharaf family achieved the "American dream." The Afghan refugee family moved to the U.S. raised their children and became wealthy and successful. But then their teenage daughter Zorah brought shame upon their family, resulting in a tragedy. But what really happened? It depends on who you ask.

*I loved this book! It was incredibly original in how Sabit chose to tell their story solely through interviews with friends, co-workers and other members of the community. I listened to this on audio and the full cast was AMAZING. Also, I love an ambiguous ending. 5 out of 5 stars.

Inharmonious by Tammye Huf
When three young Black men enlist in the US Army hoping to serve their country with honor during World War II, their lives are forever changed. Lee, Benny, Roscoe have been friends for ever but the war forces them to do things they wouldn't dream of doing. Benny begins to pass as white. Roscoe marries Benny's sister, Cora, but is unhappy. And Lee, who always loved Cora betrays her and must forgive out how to get back in her life. Based off their decisions, they must all navigate a new sense of self.

*Meh. It was entertaining enough, but it felt uneven. It felt like a majority of this book was about the love triangle between Roscoe, Lee and Cora. I would've appreciated more insight on Benny's passing as well as Roscoe's life with Megan. Oh well. 3 out of 5 stars.

Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin

 Hello my lovely readers! This book was a doozy. Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS
Timothy McVeigh wanted to start a movement.

Speaking to his lawyers days after the Oklahoma City bombing, the Gulf War veteran expressed no regrets: killing 168 people was his patriotic duty. He cited the Declaration of Independence from memory: “Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” He had obsessively followed the siege of Waco and seethed at the imposition of President Bill Clinton’s assault weapons ban. A self-proclaimed white separatist, he abhorred immigration and wanted women to return to traditional roles. As he watched the industrial decline of his native Buffalo, McVeigh longed for when America was great.

Homegrown reveals how the story of Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing is not only a powerful retelling of one of the great outrages of our time, but a warning for our future.

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe

Hello my lovely readers! Whewwww this was a HEAVY read. Let's get into it!

SYNOPSIS
Jean McConville's abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known as The Troubles. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the I.R.A. was responsible. But in a climate of fear and paranoia, no one would speak of it. In 2003, five years after an accord brought an uneasy peace to Northern Ireland, a set of human bones was discovered on a beach. McConville's children knew it was their mother when they were told a blue safety pin was attached to the dress--with so many kids, she had always kept it handy for diapers or ripped clothes.

Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders.

From radical and impetuous I.R.A. terrorists such as Dolours Price, who, when she was barely out of her teens, was already planting bombs in London and targeting informers for execution, to the ferocious I.R.A. mastermind known as The Dark, to the spy games and dirty schemes of the British Army, to Gerry Adams, who negotiated the peace but betrayed his hardcore comrades by denying his I.R.A. past--Say Nothing conjures a world of passion, betrayal, vengeance, and anguish.

Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring by Richard Gergel

Hello my lovely readers!

This was a book I randomly found while perusing my local library. I'm so glad I found it. Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS
On February 12, 1946, Sergeant Isaac Woodard, a returning, decorated African American veteran, was removed from a Greyhound bus in Batesburg, South Carolina, after he challenged the bus driver's disrespectful treatment of him. Woodard, in uniform, was arrested by the local police chief, Lynwood Shull, and beaten and blinded while in custody.

President Harry Truman was outraged by the incident. He established the first presidential commission on civil rights and his Justice Department filed criminal charges against Shull. In July 1948, following his commission's recommendation, Truman ordered an end to segregation in the U.S. armed forces. An all-white South Carolina jury acquitted Shull, but the presiding judge, J. Waties Waring, was conscience-stricken by the failure of the court system to do justice by the soldier. Waring described the trial as his "baptism of fire," and began issuing major civil rights decisions from his Charleston courtroom, including his 1951 dissent in Briggs v. Elliott declaring public school segregation per se unconstitutional. Three years later, the Supreme Court adopted Waring's language and reasoning in Brown v. Board of Education.

Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage by Heather Ann Thompson

 

Hello my lovely readers! This book...whew! Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS

On December 22, 1984, white New Yorker Bernhard Goetz shot four Black teenagers at point-blank in a New York City subway car. Goetz slipped into the subway tunnels undetected, fleeing the city to evade capture. From the moment Goetz turned himself in, the narrative surrounding the shooting became a matter of extraordinary debate, igniting public outcry and capturing the attention of the nation.

While Goetz's guilt was never in question, media outlets sensationalized the event, redirecting public ire toward the victims themselves. In the end, it would take two grand juries and a civil suit to achieve justice on behalf of the four Black teenagers. For some, Goetz would go on to become a national hero, inciting a disturbing new chapter in American history. This brutal act revealed a white rage and resentment much deeper, larger, and more insidious than the actions of Bernie Goetz himself. Intensified by politicians and tabloid media, it would lead a stunning number of white Americans to celebrate vigilantism as a fully legitimate means for addressing racial fear, fracturing American race relations.

American Reich: A Murder in Orange County, Neo-Nazis, and a New Age of Hate Eric Lichtblau

Hello my lovely readers!

This book didn't work for me. Shame. Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS

One night in early 2018, while he was home from college, an Ivy League student named Blaze Bernstein snuck out of his parents’ house in Orange County. Waiting for him in a car outside was an old high-school classmate: Sam Woodward, someone who Blaze mostly remembered as a brooding, bigoted loner. But that night, after months of flirtatious messaging, Sam had succeeded in coaxing Blaze—a gay, Jewish sophomore at UPenn—out for a rendezvous. No one would ever see him alive again.

In American Reich, veteran investigative journalist Eric Lichtblau uses the story of Blaze’s life and death to shine a light on the epidemic of hate in Southern California and, increasingly, the nation as a whole. Orange County has long been a bastion of the ultra-right: carved out of farmland as a haven for wealthy whites fleeing the diversifying metropolis to the north, it was the birthplace of the far-right John Birch Society, a hub for neo-Nazi recruitment, and a powerful springboard for race-baiting Republican politicians including Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. But in the years leading up to Blaze’s disappearance, Orange County was changing: like the country as a whole, it was rapidly diversifying, to the outrage of many of its white residents. No one was more opposed to the changes than America’s resurgent neo-Nazi groups, one of which had recently gained a new member: Sam Woodward.

Revealing how Orange County has exported racial hatred to the rest of the country and the world, American Reich weaves this tragic tale together with stories from across the nation, showing what this haunted place and the colliding paths of two of its residents reveal about America's fractured soul and our hope for healing.

Until the Last Gun is Silent: A Story of Patriotism, the Vietnam War, and the Fight to Save America's Soul by Matthew F. Delmont

Hello my lovely readers!

Naomi, reading a book about war? The world must be coming to an end! Let's get into it! 

SYNOPSIS
As the civil rights movement blazed through America, more than 300,000 Black troops were drafted and sent to fight in the Vietnam War. These soldiers, often from disadvantaged backgrounds and subjected to the brutalities of racism back home, found themselves thrust onto the frontlines of a war many saw as unjust. On the homefront, Black antiwar activists faced another battle: Opposition to the Vietnam War, vilified by key allies in the media and government as anti-American, jeopardized the fight for civil rights. For Black Americans, the Vietnam War forced a generation to question what it truly meant to fight for justice.

Award-winning civil rights historian Matthew F. Delmont weaves together the stories of two Black heroes of the Vietnam War era: Coretta Scott King, who bravely championed the antiwar cause—and eventually persuaded her husband to do the same—and Dwight “Skip” Johnson, a Medal of Honor recipient whose life ended tragically after returning from battle to his native Detroit. Together, these extraordinary accounts expose the contradictions of Black activism and military service during the Vietnam War. Through rich storytelling, Delmont offers a portrait of this period unlike any other, shedding light on a fractured civil rights movement, a generation of veterans failed by the country they served, and the valor of Black servicemen and peace advocates in the midst of it all.