The Absolutist

The Absolutist

by John Boyne

There is nothing like a well-written and compelling novel, and I have found another in The Absolutist by John Boyne.  The book is set in the time of World War I in Europe.  At age seventeen, Tristan Sandler decides to enter the war as an escape from his current situation, estranged from his family after being sent away for a ‘vile’ act (as defined for the time period): kissing his best friend, a male.  While in basic training, Tristan meets Will Bancroft, an eighteen-year-old, from another part of England and the son of a vicar.  While in training, the two young men develop a friendship that leads to something more – a physical connection and emotional connection.  The training leads to the battlefield where both men are challenged to survive and stay true to their values.  When Will captures a youthful German soldier in their area, things turn upside-down as his peer soldier kills him.  Will is enraged and felt the German youth should have become a prisoner of war.  Will decides to no longer fight in the war and looks to Tristan to support his claim to higher ranking officers.  The outcome pits the two friends against each other and leads to a surprising ending.  The book captures issues related to following your conscience, risk-taking, and the issue of homosexual relations during a time when men would be killed if they identified as gay.  The book follows the various points of struggle for Tristan from youth to being an eighty-year-old prize-winning author.  The author does an outstanding job of bringing the reader on a journey of life with a character who can never shake the decisions he makes in life.  Beautifully written and what a novel should be like.  Great read!     

Homegoing

Homegoing

by Yaa Gyasi

A very intriguing story of two half-sisters from the Fante people in Africa in the book Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi.  The book goes back and forth between the journeys of the two children (and subsequent next generations) of Maame. The book begins when a fire is started by the enslaved Asante mother, Maame, who uses this as an attempt to escape from her current entrapment by Cobbe, the father of her child.  During the fire, Maame, in a hurry to escape, leaves her daughter, Effia, behind. Effia, without her mother around, grows up under the eye of her step-mother, Baaba, who does what she can to rid her family of the young girl.  She finds the opportunity through James Collins, the governor of Cape Coast Castle, who is appointed by the British to run the slave trade.  Collins takes the young Effia as a second wife, even though he has a family back in England.  In the next chapter, Maame returns home.  She gets married to “the Big Man” of the village and they have a daughter, Esi. Later, during a raid of the village, she is captured and sold into slavery.  Each subsequent chapter follows members of the two daughter’s descendants. Esi’s family settles in America – many chapters focus on slavery there (civil war through 1960s) and all the race issues involved throughout.  The chapters following Effia are set in the Gold Coast, known now as Ghana.  Each chapter reads as a self-contained story with no need to read in any specific order.  There were some chapters I enjoyed much more than others.  Thumbs up for stories that capture the struggles of survival for the African population throughout our civilization.

Cosmos

Cosmos

by Carl Sagan

I remember seeing this book sitting on my dad’s table at home when I was a teenager.  A best-selling book at the time, Cosmos by Carl Sagan was the “go-to” book on astronomy, science, and all things “outerspace”.   The book has thirteen chapters which correlate with a TV series with the same number of editions.  The book shares very complex scientific thoughts on the development of earth, the universe and human beings in our civilization. Sagan, a Professor at Cornell University, is known in his time as the Father of Science.  The success of the book was a result of its combination of the latest scientific knowledge with amazing pictures from space.  The planets, earth’s beginnings, the stars (my favorite chapter), the development of science over the ages, telescopes and what they see, the development of travel (and its impact on what we know), and travel in space (and each voyage to that date) are a few of the various, major themes in the book.  A bit dated but great to read what was known at that moment in time.  Some major books stay best sellers, even today!

The Man Who Lived Underground

The Man Who Lived Underground

by Richard Wright

Fun to read a short story for a change… this one, The Man Who Lived Underground, is contained in the book Eight Men by Richard Wight.  Set in the 1940’s, a young black man, Fred Daniels, is forced, while under attack by three policemen, to sign a confession saying he was guilty of murdering a woman.  He escapes into the sewer system and sets off on a number of adventures, which eventually lead him back to the police station, bringing himself face-to-face with the men who held him and brutally beat him into submission.  The man is looking to find reality in an unreal world full of racism, poverty, and inequality…similar to what we still find today in society.  And seeing that Wright’s work from over eighty years ago is still appearing in today’s world is more than a tragedy! A somber view for us all to grapple with each day we live. 

When Breath Becomes Air

When Breath Becomes Air 

by Paul Kalanithi

I may have found this year’s best read in When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. When a reader connects to a story, either through great writing and/or connection to the topic, that’s a success.  The book is the real-life story of the author, a neurosurgeon trained at Stanford and Yale, who experiences the most tragic of fates as he serves his residency at Stanford University: learning that he has terminal cancer at thirty-six years old.  The story opens my own family wounds, losing my sister to cancer just a few years ago.  Linda was at the top of her field as a tile maker, in many ways similar to the skills needed to be a surgeon: precise and tactical in approaching the work.  Dr. Paul, only a year from completing his residency, is a workaholic, gaining accolades for his work.  After learning of his diagnosis, Paul decides to use the disease to teach himself and others the struggles one faces with each step of fighting cancer, including the decision of whether he and his wife should have a child (which they do). This is a book that teaches the lessons of life, a life no one wishes on anyone.  Life is never what we think it will be and reminds us how fragile life can be and that we should do all we can while we are able.  Each decision, the highs/lows and the importance of a support system (family/wife) are captured. Cancer is ugly, no matter the fighter and no matter the outcome as the unknown always sits in the mind of the patient.  How courageous that Paul leaves us with the gift of “how to determine” what makes a meaningful life along the way of his battle.  Family, work, life and death all rolled into one truly thoughtful and reflective book.

Love, Stargirl

Love, Stargirl
by Jerry Spinelli

A heartwarming older children’s book in Jerry Spinelli’s Love, Stargirl, the sequel to the original.  A year after leaving Arizona, Stargirl, a.k.a. Susan, is now a 16 year-old living in Pennsylvania (parts unknown).  Stargirl spends her year planning the next winter solstice by writing daily entries (January 1^st through end of December) in the form of a letter to Leo sharing her “love” for him.  In her new town, she meets a six-year old, an older woman who is an agoraphobe, her pet rat Cinnamon, the ‘harem girls,’ Alvina (the grumpy eleven-year-old), the old gentleman who visits his wife’s grave every day, and Perry (the mystery boy who may take Leo’s place).  Stargirl is unique and different from most girls her age – she is creative and lives to see the best in others while she is being homeschooled by her mom. The year of the LONG letter to Leo is reflective, speculating whether or not he still has feelings for her, and asking if they will ever meet again.  Her weekly preparation for the winter solstice brings her to a place of contemplation and speaking to Leo as if he were there.  The book ends with her big event – bringing all of the people she has met over the year to the early morning sunrise where lots of questions are answered: who is Perry really and will he replace Leo? Will Alvina stop being an angry youth? Who is Neva? And will Betty Lou finally leave her home?  With a surprise visit from the old sage Archie from Arizona, answers are found in a secret letter from Leo.  Asking questions and a willingness to listen to them can bring surprising answers.  Kids’ books carry such good lessons.  We need to listen to them more.

Captain of the Sands

Captain of the Sands

by Jorge Amado

What happens when the weather on Memorial Day weekend isn’t very good?  Time to read more #RAFavBooks – one each of the past six days!  There are three more days in May, so we will see if it continues!  This time a young-adults book written by a Brazilian author, Jorge Amado, called Captains of the Sands.  The book explores a young group of homeless / orphaned kids, aged seven to thirteen, living on the streets of Bahia Brazil.  The ‘gang’ go by the name Captain of the Sands and are aptly led by Pedro Bala to steal, gamble, and beg, always barely escaping the city police.  Each chapter features one of the boys and their individual stories, from falling in love, to coming down with smallpox, to deciding to join the priesthood under the leadership of Father Jose Pedro (who befriended the boys).  Later in the book, Pedro falls in love with Dora, also an orphan youth, who is captured by the police during a raid on the boys.  Pedro is jailed while Dora is placed in a reformatory and slowly becomes ill while the two are separated.  Pedro escapes but not in time to save Dora.  The chapters conclude with the group growing apart and moving in their various directions in life.  A great series of stories capturing the tales of delinquent youth who rely upon each other to make it when their lives would otherwise be nothing but despair.    

Reyita: The Life of a Black Cuban Woman in the Twentieth Century

Reyita: The Life of a Black Cuban Woman in the Twentieth Century

by Maira de los Reyes Castillo Bueno

As the student staff at NYU continues to diversify, I am reading more and more “heritage books,” historical biographies of the lives of people from homes of their ancestors.  Race, ethnicity and culture have been the foundation of many of the books in the past few weeks.  Today is no different. I venture to Cuba through the book about and written by Maria de los Reyes Castillo Bueno titled: Reyita: The Life of a Black Cuban Woman in the Twentieth Century. Reyita tells her life story to her daughter, Daisy.  As a 94 year-old Cuban woman, Reyita describes growing up in a turbulent Cuba.  The stories go deeply into family (grandmother’s struggles as a slave, her mother fighting for independence), and then into the political movements within Cuba – the deaths during the massacre of 1912, her life on the plantation, the dictatorships of Cuba, and the national rise of communism.  Reyita’s personal struggles as a black woman and her desire to marry a white man (which she eventually does) play to the core of this story.  As she notes, "I didn't want a black husband, not out of contempt for my race, but because black men had almost no possibilities of getting ahead and the certainty of facing lots of discrimination."  Reyita struggles with living in poverty, family battles, and plain-old discrimination. Through it all, she illustrates the importance of commitment to her faith in God and is seen by some as a “visionary,” where she ‘sees’ images and can predict future behavior. The book captures the role of women in Latina society as the cornerstone of the family.  Reyita stays faithful to her husband and lives a long, long life with family at the center. Interesting to note the importance of a text like this in understanding the culture of gender, race, ethnicity, and religion, all of which play a role in Cuban society.  This is a quick read and celebrates not only Reyita’s life but also the 118 people, including great-great grandchildren, in Reyita’s family. A tell-all tale of the secrets within a mother’s heart.

A Principled Stand: The Story of Hirabayashi v. United States

A Principled Stand: The Story of Hirabayashi v. United States

by Gordon Hirabayashi

As the bombs hit Pearl Harbor, the United States leadership holds Japanese Americans responsible, fearing they will turn on US Mainland.  What happens next is the tale of one individual who refuses to quietly accept the fate of being stuck in a place, yet he is unable to change his heritage as an American with ancestry from Japan.  Gordon Hirabayashi is studying at the University of Washington when he and his fellow Japanese family and friends are forced to go home and stay inside each evening at 8pm.  Gordon refuses to accept the removal of rights he had as outlined in his story:  A Principled Stand – The Story of Hirabayashi v. United States.  The story captures his life: marrying a Caucasian woman, refusing to accept discrimination, and fighting back through the courts, an effort which ultimately lands in the Supreme Court.  He is jailed for ten months and it isn’t another forty years until he has this historic case overturned in the Supreme Court.  The fear of a group of people can lead to some pretty extraordinary behaviors.  Gordon, a brilliant young man committed to peace and non-violent response, was stuck in the crossroads of “McCarthyism” at its best.  Hirabayashi’s book is a very important tale to be told so we hopefully don’t have to repeat history…but aren’t we starting to have that with our current political leaders in DC?  Pick this one up.

Afeni Shakur - Evolution of a Revolutionary

Afeni Shakur - Evolution of a Revolutionary

by Jasmine Guy

Born Alice Faye Williams and later known as Afeni Shakur, Jasmine Guy’s book Afeni Shakur – Evolution of a Revolutionary reviews her life.  Guy meets her later in her life, after the very public death of her famous son Tupac and develops a relationship.  The book is a series of meetings between the two women in which Guy asks permission to capture her story.  Afeni agrees, and the book is published.  Afeni, a one-time Black Panther, endured marriages, drug abuse, an abortion, recovery from addiction, and matriarch of her family.  The story is a gut-wrenching tale of how early abuse led a woman to the brink of despair, yet she survives.  The reader learns much about a culture of poverty, abuse, and family fame – which was cut short by murder.  Guy has presented the gritty and hard-core life of a survivor who makes her way to redemption, and we learn how through her early years of life.  Not what I expected but glad I read it.