A coolly delivered yet impassioned study of how much Trump’s election has shifted and revealed Americans’ thinking about...
A black writer tussles with race in the Trump era, taking his questions directly to the president’s supporters.
At the opening of this graceful and searching clutch of essays, Thompson (Twin of Blackness, 2015, etc.) explains that, at age 54, he’s at a crossroads. He’s long tried to think of race through the lens of idols like James Baldwin and Albert Murray, alert to racism but slow to anger over it, comfortable with white people while feeling that, often, “being American means being white.” But Trump’s election, and the racism it has exposed and often supported, has left Thompson unsettled. Taking his cue from another idol, Joan Didion, the author levelheadedly assesses the state of his racial temperament through memoir and reportage. He recalls his experience with race as a student and writer; his interactions with the children he’s raised and mentored; and the comfort he’s taken in jazz as a proxy for working through those struggles (these sections contain the author’s most lyrical writing). The heart of the book is Thompson’s reporting on interviews he conducted with three Trump supporters after the election to understand “what was going on in this country about which I had developed such uncertain feelings.” They’re not fire-breathing racists, but their masks as freedom-loving Americans often slip, revealing casually bigoted attitudes about blacks and Hispanics. Triangulating those conversations with chats with a Bronx-based nonprofit leader and the head of the National African American Gun Association, Thompson concludes that the most pernicious problem America faces regarding race, “the cold heart of the trouble,” isn’t ignorance or outright bigotry but indifference. The author isn’t despairing, but the book concludes with a sense that there’s plenty more work to do.
A coolly delivered yet impassioned study of how much Trump’s election has shifted and revealed Americans’ thinking about race.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59051-905-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
Fans of Aunty Entity and the lady who showed Mick Jagger his best moves will delight in Turner’s lightly spun memoir.
Rock-’n’-soul icon Turner is happy at last, and she wants the world to know it.
The love story of the title is specific: The 78-year-old singer has been with her German mate for 33 years, and though bits and pieces of her body have been failing and misbehaving—she recounts a stroke, kidney failure, cancer, and other maladies—her love is going strong. It’s also generalized: Turner, born Anna Mae Bullock in Nutbush, Tennessee, is enchanted by the world, from her childhood countryside to the shores of Lake Zurich, where she has lived nearly half her life. There was another love story, of course, the one that fans will know and lament: her marriage to the drug-addicted, philandering Ike Turner, of whom she writes, pointedly, “at this point in my life, I’ve spent far more time without Ike than with him.” The author emerges from these pages as self-aware and hungry for knowledge and experience. Who knew that she was a dedicated reader of Dante as well as a “favorite aunt” of Keith Richards and a practitioner of Buddhism of such long standing that Ike himself demanded that she lose her shrine? The gossip is light, though she’s clear on the many reasons she broke away from Ike. She’s also forgiving, and as for others in her circle over the years, she calls Mel Gibson “Melvin” because of his “little boy quality,” though she doesn’t approve of certain bad behavior of his. Mostly, her portraits of such figures as David Bowie and Bryan Adams are affectionate, and the secrets she reveals aren’t terribly shocking. Those fishnet stockings and short skirts, she lets slip, were more practical than prurient, the stockings running less easily than nylons and the short skirts “easier for dancing because they left my legs free."
Fans of Aunty Entity and the lady who showed Mick Jagger his best moves will delight in Turner’s lightly spun memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9824-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2018
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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