This is a well-written short memoir about the author’s family, body, and experiences as a black boy and man in America. Kiese Laymon is an English professor from Mississippi, and this memoir starts when he was 11 and continues through his 40s, though of course covering so many years in 241 pages means we skip over a lot. The memoir is addressed to his mother, who is one of those mothers people are especially driven to write memoirs about: brilliant, loving, and abusive. He also writes a lot about his body issues, going from obesity to what looks like anorexia and an exercise obsession, and then back.

So there’s a lot packed into this book, and it’s highly readable although often “heavy” material. The sections about how Laymon saw black college students being harshly disciplined for minor infractions while white students got off with a slap on the wrist for much more serious crimes (or in one case, even pawned off their own culpability on unknown but totally scary people of color) was particularly hard-hitting to me. There’s a lot in the book that’s very raw, though told in an artful way by an author skilled at rhetoric. Much of it won’t be surprising to anyone who’s read much about race in America, but the author’s perspective makes a lot of sense.

It isn’t my favorite book of the year, perhaps because it isn’t written “for” me—Laymon writes about wanting to write for black people, which makes sense. Sometimes I found it a little confusing. At times in small ways: like many memoirists, Laymon leans heavily on brand names, which can be confusing if you don’t share the author’s pop-cultural background. And also in larger ways: the author seems to imply that his mother sexually abused him, but never explicitly says so even while he writes a lot about the need for radical honesty within his family, which tends to bury everything. In the end I wasn’t sure whether he was being cagey or I was reading in something that wasn’t there.

At any rate, this is a good book and well worth reading for anyone looking to read about race in America, or just looking for a good memoir.

This is a very informative book about a piece of American history that many of us don’t fully understand, even if we think we do: specifically, how we arrived at a place of extensive residential segregation, and how the government was way more involved in creating it than most Americans believe. The text is compact (217 pages, followed by 20 pages of FAQs and then extensive notes and bibliography) and a little bit dense, but it is accessible even if not quite as entertaining as much of the nonfiction I read.

Americans tend to assume that the U.S. became segregated based largely on the private choices of some white racists and of black people preferring to live amongst their own. However, as professor Richard Rothstein shows in detail, the truth is that government was heavily involved in promoting and condoning the segregation of African-Americans into poor communities throughout much of the 20th century. Interestingly, in the decades after slavery ended, progress was made, many integrated neighborhoods existed, and some black people attained professional success, only to see much of this progress reversed between the turn of the century and the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 70s.

Governmental involvement in segregation was extensive. The Federal Housing Authority (FHA) would only guarantee mortgages for white people, at a time when the U.S. was aggressively promoting a homeownership policy for fear of its own Russian Revolution. Uniquely at this time in history, working-class people could buy homes with no down payment and favorable mortgage terms, allowing their families to build equity for generations to come…. but only if the buyers in question were white. The FHA would also only make loans to developers who promised to build whites-only neighborhoods, often enforced through requirements in deeds that the property could only be sold to white people, which courts upheld for decades. Public housing, likewise, tended to be for whites only, with a few segregated projects for black people. Without the opportunity to get a mortgage, African-Americans were forced to double up, spend far more of their income on housing, and live in subpar areas. Municipalities took further advantage of this through zoning requirements forcing homes to be larger than black people could afford, or outright zoning particular areas as single-race-only.

Meanwhile, real estate codes classified selling homes in white neighborhoods to black people as an ethics violation—except when “blockbusting” was involved, essentially scaring white people into selling their homes fast because black people were moving in, buying the homes cheap and then selling them at high prices to African-Americans. Local governments blocked developments that would have served black people through whatever means they could, whether rezoning or increasing sewage costs to make development untenable. Local residents harassed, threatened, and in some cases bombed the homes of black people who dared move into white neighborhoods, generally while the police stood by. But black neighborhoods weren’t safe either; the interstate highway program demolished many of them even when alternate routes were available.

Finally, of course, housing does not exist in a vacuum. What you can afford depends on how much money you make, and black people faced hurdles in earning what they should have. Employers often relocated to areas in which there was no housing available to black people, and public transit from black neighborhoods to jobs has been a far lower priority than highways serving white suburbanites. Unions were allowed to discriminate against black workers and keep them in the most menial jobs. African-Americans who had reached supervisory roles in the civil service were demoted to ensure that they didn’t supervise any white people. And disproportionately higher property tax assessments also left black people with less money to spend.

This book is a thoroughly researched and scholarly account of a shameful chapter in American history that has lasting repercussions today. The value of white Americans’ property appreciated enormously in the decades that black people were barred from buying the same, putting anyone buying afterwards far behind the curve, and with wages stagnant for the last several decades, this disparity in assets will be difficult to reverse anytime soon. The author is up-front about the fact that the solutions he offers are not politically feasible in today’s environment, but he’d be lying if he claimed there was an easy or universally palatable fix.

Overall, this is very much worth reading even if you think you know a lot about American racial history. For those who are interested, it would make sense read alongside The New Jim Crow. Unfortunately, policies removing black Americans from their land continue even today, as this compelling article about the consequences of heirs’ property shows.

Read through page 49.

It's odd to call a book both florid and dull, but in this case both adjectives seem apt. In part it's perhaps because the author waxes florid and wordy on topics that are either unimportant or speculative. Why do we need an extended description of the route Henry Hudson might have walked through London from his house to a meeting with the directors of the Muscovy Company, who then turned him down for his intended voyage, after which he wound up being sponsored by a Dutch company instead? This walk through London seems like a fairly meaningless moment in his life, much less to the history of New Amsterdam before it became New York. This book promised to reveal the little-known Dutch influences on America, after which I found it strange to have so much emphasis on Brits rather than Dutch people in the text.

On to the next one.

This is my first year reading the Best American Short Stories, after having gotten more into short stories over the last few years. I am not a fan of multi-author anthologies, finding them impossible to “get into” when each new story is like starting a new book, and that’s particularly true here, where there is no unifying theme. From reading a number of both brief and in-depth reviews of this collection and its stories, I have the sense this year wasn’t the best for this series. Many readers only connected with a couple of the stories, though Doerr must have done something right in selecting them when readers’ favorites seem to vary so widely. Looking through the top reviews on this page shows that while most readers only really liked a third or fewer of the stories, almost every story made somebody’s shortlist, with little consistency in which were the favorites. For me the only two standouts are “Letter of Apology” by Maria Reva and “Omakase” by Weike Wang, but I liked these enough that I now plan to read the authors’ books.

So, a rundown in order of appearance:

“The Era” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah: The collection begins with a dystopian tale about a world in which kindness and human connection are despised, and the resulting hole is filled with constant injections of drugs. All this I think is astute commentary on certain trends in our society, but I found other elements – like the genetic engineering that sometimes goes wrong and gives people only one personality trait – rather less relevant, and like many insecure sci-fi stories, this one spends way too much time talking about why their values aren’t our values and how our world became theirs. It’s as if we went around talking about the Renaissance all the time and why we aren’t like those people; I’m not buying.

“Natural Light” by Kathleen Alcott: This is perhaps the most literary and best-written story in the collection, about a woman in her 30s who discovers something new about her deceased mother. I admire the author’s skill a lot, but her subject matter was too run-of-the-mill to interest me in reading more, and I still can’t figure out the ending; the last couple of sentences just seem like word salad to me. The story made more sense once

“The Great Interruption” by Wendell Berry: An entertaining boyhood escapade turns into a local legend, which is then used to comment on the demise of local culture in America. A well-written story, though Berry’s nostalgia for the rural America of yore is steeped in white male privilege, which though not acknowledged becomes visible at one point when the females privileged to hear the original story are referred to as the “housewives and big girls” of the community (it contained no other adult women).

“No More Than a Bubble” by Jamel Brinkley: Two college boys crash a party with the goal of hooking up with a pair of slightly older women, and wind up way out of their depth. It’s a vividly told tale but I didn’t really know what to make of this one. The problematic aspects of the boys’ sexuality are clearly acknowledged, but I didn’t know how to reconcile Ben’s

“The Third Tower” by Deborah Eisenberg: In a vaguely-sketched dystopian world, the medical system tries to stamp out the creativity and possibly repressed memories of government-sponsored horror from the mind of a young woman. This one was a little too on-the-nose for me, and Therese’s gullibility and eager compliance made it harder for me to have strong feelings about what was being done to her.

“Hellion” by Julia Elliott: An adolescent girl in rural South Carolina befriends a visiting boy, and unfortunate consequences follow from their actions. It’s sweet enough I suppose, but what Doerr cites as its exuberance and courage, for me was just over-the-top in a way that seems almost careless: the character referred to as having grown up “before the Civil War” early enough in the story that we don’t yet realize this isn’t meant literally (it’s set in the 1980s or thereabouts); the young female narrator going off on a sudden tangent about people killing the planet when she’d never before mentioned an interest in science or ecology and again, it’s the 1980s. It all felt a bit haphazard to me, and the grounding in serious questions about whether this girl has a shot at a fulfilling life wasn’t quite enough to draw it back.

“Bronze” by Jeffrey Eugenides: A gender-nonconforming freshman meets an older gay man on the train home to college from New York, and has to finally decide whether he’s actually gay and if not, whether his self-expression is worth letting people read him that way. Interesting enough but didn’t do much for me, though I did find it interesting that Eugenides developed the older man, who without getting a point-of-view would have just been a standard creep.

“Protozoa” by Ella Martinsen Gorham: A 14-year-old girl tries to establish her self-identity in both the real and virtual worlds. Doerr perhaps sells this one short by calling it a cautionary tale about the amount of investment teens put into their online lives; in many ways Noa seems to live more in the real world than a lot of teens (she interacts with quite a few people in real life over the course of the story), and I found myself thinking that the cautionary message might have been sent more effectively. But I’m not sure the author actually intended the story as anything so simple: what might have been portrayed as traumatizing cyberbullying in another story, Noa seems perfectly well-equipped to handle and even in some ways to welcome, while her real story is about trying to establish herself as someone darker and edgier.

“Seeing Ershadi” by Nicole Krauss: A dancer and her friend both attribute newfound motivation to leave bad situations to visions of actor Homayoun Ershadi. This one didn’t really do anything for me. It seems to have a hole at its center: we hear a lot about the plot of the Iranian film Taste of Cherry, and a lot about the narrator’s friend’s life, while the narrator’s own life and decisions are sidelined. It is sweet though that according to the author’s note at the end, Ershadi read and was touched by the story at a difficult point in his own life.

“Pity and Shame” by Ursula Le Guin: An outcast young woman in a late 19th century California mining town cares for a lonely mine engineer injured in an accident, and the two of them and a doctor all form a bond. A sweet story but not one that leaves the reader with much to think about, despite the author’s legendary status.

“Anyone Can Do It” by Manual Muñoz: A young mother struggles to figure out how to pay the bills when her husband, along with other farmworkers, is suddenly snatched by immigration. Timely, certainly, though set in the 1980s rather than the present, and the author adds some complexity in that, for instance, Delfina doesn’t actually seem to like or miss her husband much. But she was a bit of a hollow character that was hard for me to root for, and

“The Plan” by Sigrid Nunez: Inside the mind of a killer. Interesting enough, but didn’t do much for me.

“Letter of Apology” by Maria Reva: In late Soviet Ukraine, a KGB agent is required to extract a letter of apology from a renowned poet for making a political joke. The agent, who narrates the story, is in denial about certain aspects of his own life, leading him to wildly misinterpret the behavior of the poet’s wife. I loved this one: there’s a ton of humor in the contrast between the dread image of the KGB and the reality of the bumbling and confused Mikhail, as well as the absurdities of the system as a whole. The whole story is full of dark humor and the changes wrought in both Mikhail and Milena seemed very real and sympathetic to me. I was excited to find that the author has also published this as part of a whole collection of linked short stories.

“Black Corfu” by Karen Russell: On a Croatian island in 1620, ruled at the time from Venice, a black man wanted to be a doctor but is permitted only to cut the hamstrings of the dead, meant to prevent them from rising again as less-violent zombies, known as vukodlak. He’s falsely accused of botching a procedure – or is the accusation really false? This was my first exposure to an author who’s gotten a lot of buzz lately, and the story hits a lot of buttons in terms of racial prejudice and glass ceilings, but didn’t actually work well for me.

“Audition” by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh: A young man who wants to be an actor instead, for unspecified reasons, works on construction sites owned by his father, a real estate developer, and seems to be falling under the spell of crack. This didn’t do much for me.

“Natural Disasters” by Alexis Schaitkin: A young New Yorker moves to Oklahoma with her husband, where she takes a job writing descriptions of houses for sale and tries to fit everything that happens into some meaningful narrative of her life. I enjoyed the narrator’s voice, her obvious pretention and her adult awareness of it when telling the story from the vantage point of many years later, but I was underwhelmed and unconvinced by the “big event.”

“Our Day of Grace” by Jim Shepard: An epistolary story about the American Civil War: two southern women write letters to two Confederate soldiers, one of whom writes back. The letters are credible enough but the Civil War has also been pretty well done to death as a setting, and in my view this didn’t do anything new or exciting.

“Wrong Object” by Mona Simpson: A therapist treats a man who at first seems boring, but then reveals that he only experiences sexual attraction to adolescent girls, though he insists he’s never acted upon it. This is interesting, but perhaps too short for me. I would have liked to know a little more about the therapist’s life, which is only vaguely hinted at, and to have seen the consequences at the end developed a little more. But the existence of people seeking treatment for pedophilia who have never acted on their urges was not new information to me, which may have blunted my reaction to the story.

“They Told Us Not To Say This” by Jenn Alandy Trahan: Blink and you’ll miss this 7-page story, told in the first person plural about a group of second-generation Filipina-American girls who are second-class in their families but find empowerment on the basketball court. This is the one story no reviewer seems to have highlighted as a favorite, and I can see why not.

“Omakase” by Weike Wang: A Chinese-American woman in her late 30s goes out for omakase (in Japanese, “I’ll leave it up to you”; in restaurants, sushi selected by the chef) with her white boyfriend, who increasingly shows his obliviousness about racial issues and his dismissive and condescending attitude toward her, despite the fact that she’s the one to do most of the sacrificing and pay most of the bills in their relationship. It’s interesting to see the widely varied responses that reviewers have had, some feeling that all the ways in which the woman is marginalized and put down in the world and within her own relationship to be too stereotypical, while others seem to take the boyfriend’s opinions at face value and view her as too sensitive and neurotic for her own good. Those varying responses are certainly a testament to the realism of the story. She is a bit neurotic, but to me much of this is the conflict generated by her instincts telling her she’s in a bad situation, while everyone around her (boyfriend, family, friends) insists that the only problem is her – thereby robbing her of the sense of self-worth she needs to actually stand up for herself. She comes across as real and vibrant, as do the racial issues addressed, and I’m interested in reading Wang’s novel.

Overall, an interesting collection of stories I don’t regret reading, but that took me a really long time to get through. I’m not sure if I’ll try another of these collections, but I did at least discover a couple of promising authors.

***Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Thank you NetGalley and Public Affairs!***

I stopped reading this book about 150 pages in, roughly halfway. I make an effort to not put down a book less than halfway through in order to be fair. Sometimes things start to look up after a rocky beginning. To be clear, I did not put this book away because it was poorly written. Indeed, it was excellently written. But I felt like the author has gotten it wrong when it came to his starting thesis. And unfortunately, if your starting thesis is incorrect, then some or all of your conclusions probably will be too.

The author has a very big bias in favor of China. This was evident throughout the Introduction when he basically said that China is the victim of cultural misunderstanding and that America was mostly afraid of powerful “yellow” people (his words, not mine) and mistakenly thinks that all Communism is the same as the Soviet Union was. But I carried on in spite of this obvious bias because the next two chapters were about the biggest mistakes so far that each of the world superpowers has made. I thought, maybe here is where we get a more evenhanded approach.

Unfortunately we did not. According to the author, China’s biggest mistake is that it gives too much power to local governments and Beijing is largely powerless to control them. For example, the author mentions that businesses are very wary of working in China because they feel that China takes advantage of them and threatens them with access to the Chinese market if they don’t comply to outrageous. His example is a business that states they had a contract with a Chinese company that they would utilize their services for a set number of years and then buy the company outright for X price at the end of that period. When that date came the company refused to sell. The business petitioned to the courts in Beijing and were told “well pay them more money then and buy the business”. The author attributes this to a lack of centralized leadership. That is blatantly false and biased. That is called extortion. If the courts had said “Sorry, this is an issue with the local jurisdiction” that would prove the author’s point. But they acted like a mob enforcer “Pay more money, then they’ll sell.” The author gives this kind of leniency to the Chinese government over and over again.

And still, I continued. I thought that perhaps when the author was describing the largest mistake by America that we would see the same leniency. We did not. The author spends the entire chapter demonizing President Trump and demonizing businesses for blaming it on American war culture. And then throwing in some demonization of America’s lack of social justice for good measure. Americans just want to believe that all Communism is bad, so that’s why we demonize China. Again, this is a flawed premise. The Chinese Communist Party is bad. They have upwards of 1.5 million people imprisoned in labor camps, another half million in re-education centers. Stories abound from survivors of these camps of the rampant abuse and rape that goes on. Defectors from the CCP are executed silently and immediately, potentially thousands of people per year. The CCP has  launched genocidal massacres on Tibetans, Buddhists, Christians and Muslims within the past decade. Don’t try and blow that particular sunshine about good Communism up my behind, thanks all the same!

In the end, this author thinks China is a great place and America is inherently racist with a psycho for a President. To me, that indicates that all conclusions that he draws will be flawed. So while the author asks a lot of interesting questions, the answers will likely be unsatisfying.