Curious, Healing

Books about healing, business, and fun

“May We Forever Stand” by Imani Perry

by Leave a Comment

book cover
Subtitle: A History of the Black National Anthem

Recommended to me by: Jesse the K

The author Dr. Imani Perry was at the time of publication in 2018 the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Wikipedia says that in addition to a Ph.D., she has a J.D. from Harvard Law School. As of 2023, she is now a professor at Harvard.Her book is a carefully researched and engagingly written in-depth historical study of the song “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as it has been intertwined with Black Americans’ creation of a rich community life and struggles for civil rights.

The song was written by brothers James Weldon Johnson (lyrics) and John Rosamond Johnson (music) in 1900 in Jacksonville, Florida. The song spread among the many Black formal and informal community associations and was soon named the Black National Anthem.

It was sung at all-Black schools as part of nurturing the pride and sense of self of the students. It was woven into plays created to educate children and adults alike about the struggles and achievements of Black Americans. It created solidarity and hope.

The book contains enough content for a semester course on Black American History from the end of the Civil War through to the 1980s, with “Lift Every Voice and Sing” tying it all together.

Highly recommended.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Discount Armageddon: InCryptid 1” by Seanan McGuire

by Leave a Comment

book cover
Recommended to me by: Sean Eric Fagan’s Kindle giveaway @wandering.shop

This urban fantasy is not at all my kind of book, with a hard-boiled first person narrative and a lot of violence. I nearly put it down a couple of times, but kept reading because I have some time on my hands and the plot kept humming along. In the end, there was less dance involved than I hoped for at the beginning. It’s great that the main character is a woman, although the male side character is the one who grows and changes.

While the main character’s parents seem loving and involved in her life, raising child soldiers is still child abuse.

I appreciate the anti-xenophobia message of the book. At the same time, I wonder why none of the characters in New York City read as Black (thank goodness the monsters don’t read as Black) and some of the non-humans read very much like exoticized Asian women.

This is the first in a long series of InCryptid books with “discount” themed titles, per the InCryptid page on Seanan McGuire’s website, good news if they’re your kind of thing.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors” edited by Grist

by Leave a Comment

book cover

Grist is a non-profit news organization that reports on climate change with a focus on equity. They run an annual short-story contest called Imagine 2200 and publish the winning and runner-up stories. This is the 2021 collection. The stories are available on Grist’s website

Many of the stories create a plausible future world that includes disaster and moves beyond it to show thriving and surviving communities. The stories are written by diverse authors and include characters from a variety of cultures, with a variety of skin colors, sexual orientations, genders, and abilities or disabilities. These futures include us all.

I had read Marissa Lingen’s story A Worm to the Wise before, and was happy to see it again. The other stories and authors were new to me, and I liked almost all of them. One of them made me cry, in a good way.

The stories all include some kind of hope, and they all include grief for what is lost. This is not “lalala we can ignore climate change,” but “let’s talk about how we can learn new skills and change our priorities so we can survive and thrive.” Recommended.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Writing Down the Bones” by Natalie Goldberg

by Leave a Comment

book cover
Subtitle: Freeing the Writer Within

Recommended to me by: finding it in a little free library

Natalie Goldberg combines writing practice and Zen practice in short chapters where she shares about her own writing adventures, and repeatedly admonishes the reader (or herself) to just sit down and write. I appreciated her ongoing willingness to sink into the depths of herself and write whatever showed up. The book veers between writing exercises, Zen wisdom, and her anxiety about eating too many brownies.

“A writer’s job is to make the ordinary come alive, to awaken to the specialness of simply being.”

“If you give yourself over to honesty in your practice, it will permeate your life.”

“We are good, and when our work is good, it is good. We should acknowledge it and stand behind it.”

I wonder if this book would have landed differently for me if I had read it when I was still writing and sending out an article each month. Since writing is not something I’m trying to make a living at, I don’t have the urgency or intensity around it that this book speaks to.

Recommended for people wrestling with being a writer as an identity, a practice, and/or a career.

Available at bookshop.org.

“The Boston Girl” by Anita Diamant

by Leave a Comment

book cover
Recommended to me by: thistle in grey

I picked this up because I enjoyed “The Red Tent” a long time ago. They have in common gripping characterization and story, careful research, and being centered on Jewish women. The writing is note-perfect and pulled me forward through the whole book.

This is the sweeping story of Addie Baum’s life, as told to her beloved granddaughter from the vantage point of being 85 years old. She was born in 1900 to struggling immigrant parents from Russia who settled in Boston. She seizes any bit of luck, care, opportunity, and friendship that comes her way, and works fiercely to make her way and succeed. She offers luck, care, opportunity, and friendship to people struggling around her when she can. She both flees and stands by her family.

She faces a lot of grief and loss. The book tells the stories, but does not linger on the pain. Perhaps it makes sense from the vantage point of being 85 years old. Perhaps a relief for the modern reader when the losses touch too close to home, like those from the 1918 flu pandemic (although this was published 5 years before the start of the Covid pandemic). At times it felt dismissive, although “face forward and don’t think about it” must have been the mantra of the times.

As a Jewish reader with immigrant parents who settled on the East Coast, I appreciated the resonances in the book, even though my parents arrived half a century later and did not struggle with poverty in the same way. I wonder sometimes what it’s like to be part of the dominant culture and have almost everything resonate like that.

Highly recommended!

Available at bookshop.org.

“brown girl dreaming” by Jacqueline Woodson

by Leave a Comment

book cover
Recommended to me by: Reading Jaqueline Woodson’s children’s book The Day You Begin

In spare, elegant poetry with each word exactly as it needs to be, Jacqueline Woodson takes us back before her birth in her family history, and then slowly forward in time. She shares her sensory experiences as a young child in Ohio and then in the South, and later after her family moved to Brooklyn, NY. The writing is lyrical, gripping, joyous, painful.

Life is dangerous for a Black family in the 60s and 70s, and she grieves for relatives as they die, at the same time as she struggles with reading in school and bonds with a neighbor girl as Forever Friends. She is aware of the struggle for civil rights, and participates as much as she can.

Highly recommended! Every word is worth reading, through the acknowledgements and end notes all the way to the photographs of family members as children at the very end.

Available at bookshop.org.