Books Archives - Talk Poverty https://talkpoverty.org/tag/books/ Real People. Real Stories. Real Solutions. Fri, 05 Oct 2018 15:27:15 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://cdn.talkpoverty.org/content/uploads/2016/02/29205224/tp-logo.png Books Archives - Talk Poverty https://talkpoverty.org/tag/books/ 32 32 Read a Book: Fall 2018 Releases for When the News Is Too Much https://talkpoverty.org/2018/10/05/read-book-fall-2018-releases-news-much/ Fri, 05 Oct 2018 14:43:42 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=26697 After I graduated from college, I stopped reading books. I still read constantly — the Internet is great at inundating us with writing — but it was always piecemeal. I’d take in a few hundred words from breaking news reports or beloved blogs, or a few thousand from think pieces. For a while, that felt like it worked.

Then the Trump administration happened. For the past two years, reading the news has felt like inviting the worst parts of humanity to practice punching me in the solar plexus. What’s worse, on days that felt comparatively slow — when we weren’t on the brink of war or gutting our health care or bulldozing our immigration law — I got anxious. I was starting to depend on the Trump administration to provide me with something to which I could react.

That mode of thinking is exhausting. Even worse, it’s limiting. Instead of focusing on what society has the potential to be, I was focused only on the depths to which I hoped we wouldn’t sink.

It turns out that books can be a helpful remedy to this problem. They provide room for writers to explore, to indulge nuance, to push on boundaries, and provide readers the time to reflect on what’s been written. And, unlike Twitter, they don’t shine a bright electronic light in my eyes when I’m trying to go to bed.

This the first in a regular series rounding up books the TalkPoverty staff loves. We’re kicking it off with new releases that are all relevant to today’s most pressing issues, but excel in delving into the shades of gray that are often missing from breaking news coverage and Twitter threads.

 

Fiction

The Golden State by Lydia Kiesling

In some ways, The Golden State is a classic road novel: It follows its main character, Daphne, as she flees San Francisco and sets out for the high desert of California. She’s looking, like so many travelers before her, for freedom, adventure, and a break from bureaucracy. The catch is that unencumbered freedom isn’t a real option: Every point in Daphne’s journey is marked by her caretaking of her 16-month-old daughter, Honey.

Daphne’s relationship with her daughter, and with motherhood, has a fullness and honesty I’ve only seen once before (in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts). She loves her daughter desperately, but her exhaustion and frustration with Honey’s needs and tantrums slowly build into something like dread and rage. The result is a novel that’s both beautiful and challenging, probing ideas around domesticity and freedom of movement that, in worse books, are treated as if they are opposites.

For you if: You’re interested in experimental stream-of-consciousness works, or themes around immigration, parenting, and domesticity.

 

The Caregiver by Samuel Park

Park’s last novel, completed shortly before his death, is another, completely different, mother-daughter tale. It alternates between 1980s Brazil and 1990s Los Angeles while the main character, Mara, cares for a woman dying of stomach cancer who dredges up memories of Mara’s complicated relationship with her mother. It’s a story about the way Mara survived in both countries — as an undocumented caretaker in the United States and as a poor child in Brazil — that’s engaging, if slightly soapy.

The book alternates between being thrilling and introspective, vacillations that are almost certainly due to Park imbuing the women for whom Mara was caring with the same illness that was killing him.

For you if: You want to a novel with compelling characters that’s heavy on plot, or themes around being undocumented or providing health care.

 

Non-fiction

Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World by Annie Lowrey

Universal Basic Incomes are officially mainstream, but advocates of the policy — from Silicon Valley tech bros to libertarians to Black Lives Matter activists — are strange bedfellows with very different explanations for why we should give everyone a monthly cash sum.

Lowrey’s book walks through each group’s justification for backing the policy. She’s thorough and respectful of subjects throughout, but clear about whose arguments she is — and isn’t — buying.

For you if: You want an accessible long read on a newly-trendy economic policy.

 

What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte

This pocket-sized rebuttal to the oft-cited Hillbilly Elegy re-situates Appalachia as part of the United States, instead of the far-thrown Trump Country that has been the subject of media fascination.

Catte, a historian from East Tennessee, walks readers through the region’s history with industry and race, and current residents’ organizing efforts around land and labor. While the book doesn’t transform the region into a liberal paragon, Catte does portray it with the kind of nuance you would expect from a real place: one with serious problems, a complicated history, and a lot of very different people trying to figure out what to do next.

For you if: You’re still talking about Linda Tirado’s drunk reading of Hillbilly Elegy.

 

Memoir

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh

Sarah Smarsh has been treated as a sort of spokeswoman for the working class since her viral essay, “Poor Teeth,”  captured her family’s experience with a blend of honesty, compassion, and humor that only comes with real experience. Her memoir, Heartland, is written from the very same place as the essay that made her famous: One that has the audacity to love and respect a poor family.

The book tells stories that are equal parts joyful and horrifying, and situates her family’s life in the policies that made it impossible for them to afford health insurance or compete with agribusiness. It’s not quite perfect — the framing device featuring a non-existent daughter doesn’t quite land for me — but it’s an extremely powerful and pointed meditation on class in America.

For you if: You’re a sucker for a beautiful memoir.

 

Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower by Brittney Cooper

Before Rebecca Traister published her much-anticipated Good and Mad, Brittney Cooper had written an entire treatise on the power in black women’s anger, and the contempt the country has for it.

Eloquent Rage focuses on the web of sexism, racism, and class, grounding Cooper’s understanding of all three in her own coming of age. And, most importantly, it takes on the current feminist movement — one often grounded in whiteness — and forces readers to recognize how that “fucks shit up for everybody.”

For you if: You prefer your life lessons delivered by someone else’s grandma.

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Zadie Smith’s ‘Swing Time’ Doesn’t Preach About Inequality. That’s Why It Works. https://talkpoverty.org/2016/12/06/zadie-smiths-swing-time-doesnt-preach-inequality-thats-works/ Tue, 06 Dec 2016 14:25:59 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=21840 A popular argument splashed across social media feeds and bars and dinner tables is that “this is not about that.”

After Mike Brown was shot and left for dead in the street in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, half of America tripped over itself to say it was because he was not complying with police orders—not because he was black. When a New York senator proposed a bill that would ban people from using food stamps to buy steak and lobster, supporters insisted it was about avoiding abuse of the welfare system—not about deep-rooted discomfort with social services.

In other words, we do not like the suggestion that things might be about other things, particularly when those other things would force an admission that other people’s stories might be different—and harder—than our own.

So to avoid that argument, and to be quite clear: Swing Time, Zadie Smith’s latest novel, is not about racial or economic inequality.

It is not about anything, per se. It is a novel and a work of art, and those needn’t be about anything other than the book’s narrative plot: Two half-black, half-white girls grow up together in Northwest London and grow apart. One, Tracey, is an innately talented dancer, but she was not born into the sort of existence that makes it easy for her to make a living from those talents. The other, the unnamed narrator, has the chance to go to university and become the personal assistant to a white pop star, a grueling job that nevertheless means she gets to travel the world and see how the one percent of the one percent live. The novel is an exploration of female friendship and black womanhood and personal growth and dance—a number of things that are not inequality, exactly. Because it’s not about that.

Except that inequality informs all of that.

None of that is about racial or economic inequality, exactly—but it is intertwined with it.

Early on in the book, Tracey suggests that things are different—and harder—for her because her father is black, and in and out of jail. Tracey’s story is not about that—her father—but it is shaped by him. Just as it is shaped by the reality that her mother is raising a daughter on her own, and that her body develops differently than other girls’ bodies, and that her school system does not know what to do with her, and that she herself becomes a single mother. None of that is about racial or economic inequality, exactly—but it is intertwined with it.

The narrator’s pop star boss’s story is not about the reverse side of inequality—not exactly. But the pop star is able to pay people to work out every detail of her life and never tire (because she is tiring others). She can assume that because she made it out of Bendigo, Australia, everyone else can escape the confines of their hometowns and backgrounds, too. She can navigate the bureaucracy of an African country without getting to know much of anything about it, and open up a school for girls there without worrying what problems doing so might cause. None of that is about inequality, exactly—but neither is it free of it.

The narrator herself is torn between these two parts of her life. She has to leave her racially-mixed neighborhood—and her black mother, and her mother’s way of looking at the world—when she goes to university and out into the working world. She has to make professional compromises—has to support a white woman while she sets up a school in Africa that might do more harm than good, and has to watch her practice a performance that almost certainly constitutes cultural appropriation—even though, because of who she is, she knows better.

Even as she struggles, the narrator remains painfully aware of the ways that inequality shapes the world. “There is no case I can make,” the narrator confesses toward the end of the novel, “that will change the fact that I was her [Tracey’s] only witness, the only person who knows all that she has in her, all that’s been ignored and wasted, and yet I still left her back there, in the ranks of the unwitnessed, where you have to scream to get heard.”

And what abandoned Tracey in those ranks—and left her screaming and made her friend feel it was her fault—if not inequality?

Swing Time is a book well worth reading. It’s beautifully written, and Smith’s prose dances like her characters. She moves across decades and oceans to create characters who are neither heroes nor villains, but humans.

There are non-fiction books one can read that are explicitly about inequality, but this isn’t one of them. This isn’t about that.

Except that, yes, of course it is.

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