Edward P. Jones's The Known World

Happy Black History Month! When I started The Known World by Edward P. Jones last month, it was coincidental that I would be finishing it this month, but how appropriate that I'd be reading such a wonderfully powerful novel of African American historical fiction during a time we especially dedicate to the celebration of black history, and at a time when the president-elect has insulted and attempted to undermine the great civil rights hero, John Lewis, and seems to think Frederick Douglass is alive doing an "amazing job." Meanwhile, the vice president honored black history month by praising the work of a white man. Lest we ever forget the power of books, John Lewis's memoir and graphic novel trilogy sold out on Amazon when news spread about Trump's attack on the now politician. It is so important for people to engage with stories and histories that provide insight on the continuing inequalities in our government, society, and world.

The Known World among just a few other
books my TBR pile.

The Known World is set in the antebellum South as the US nears its Civil War. The plot is compelling because it complicates the history of the slaveholding south by telling the story of a freed slave, Henry, who then becomes a slaveholder. The book illuminates the varied reactions to this reality: disappointed parents who were former slaves themselves; a proud former-master who facilitates the purchase of Henry's new slaves; poor men in the community who resent that a black man has slaves while they do not. All these relationships illuminate the system that on the one hand views black people as property, but on the other hand has so engrained the idea of slavery that it can be legal for anyone to own slaves and to continue to reinforce the system.

I also celebrated Black History Month with Octavia E. Butler's Kindred and Miguel Barnet's Biography of a Runaway Slave. Next I'll be digging into Daina Ramey Berry's hot-off-the-press The Price for their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved from Womb to Grave in the Building of a Nation from Beacon Press. Don't limit reading about black history to this month--these stories and histories are crucial every day.


Barnet, Miguel. Biography of a Runaway Slave: Fiftieth Anniversary Edition. Trans. W. Nick Hill.
     Evanston: Curbstone/Northwestern University Press, 2016.
Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Boston: Beacon Pres, 2003.
Jones, Edward P. The Known World. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.

Punctuated Post: Jonathan Safran Foer's Here I Am

Note the Arizona-themed bookmark
cross-stitched by my mother.

This book is long enough, so I will keep my thoughts to a Punctuated Post. I do not regret a single minute of the time I spent reading the nearly 600 pages of Jonathan Safran Foer's latest novel, Here I Am. In fact, most of it felt fairly fast-paced. There is a great deal of dialogue, and various narrative strategies keep the pages turning. If anything slows down the reading pace, it is the need to process some of the deep emotional episodes that sustain the book. From family to catastrophe, this book covers the gamut of heart-wrenching scenarios. And, I suppose it is this very breadth that became, in my opinion, the greatest weakness of the book. When a book is about everything, it sometimes feels like it is about nothing. Is this book about the father character, Jacob? His family? Dealing with crises? Politics and political catastrophe? Religion? Death and loss? I am never one to shy away from a long book with a complex plot, yet a can't fight the suspicion that this book would be even better if it were about just a little less.

While I would have wished for a little more focus to guide me to the core message that the author wanted the reader to walk away with, there were little literary nuggets throughout the book that served as a huge payoff for the reader. I'll end with one sentiment that resounded with me.

Jonathan Safran Foer, Here I Am, p. 493

Foer, Jonathan Safran. Here I Am. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016.

My Top Book Pick of 2016: Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad

Hasta la vista, 2016

There were a lot of things not to like about 2016. A lot. But there was also some good interspersed among the gut-wrenching disappointments. Some of my favorite things about 2016 included my discovery of the book app Litsy (where you can find me @ReadosaurusText), Teen Vogue emerging as a serious source of political news and commentary, and it was an incredible year for the visibility and popularity of African American nonfiction and fiction. Ibram X. Kendi won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. Heather Ann Thompson's Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy was a finalist for the same award and has earned oodles of other accolades. On the fiction side, we saw the Collected Poems: 1974-2004 of Rita Dove, the latest Walter Mosley, and of course Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad.

I realize that picking The Underground Railroad as my favorite book of 2016 is not especially groundbreaking--as a best-selling, award-winning, Oprah's Book Club title, it is not much of a revelation to declare this book as good and worth reading. This book is truly special, though. The Underground Railroad follows the motivations and experiences of a young enslaved woman named Cora. As she undertakes a personal journey, so does the reader, and that journey is at once difficult to read and impossible to draw away from. I read this book months ago, and Cora still says with me, the way you think back to a person you met briefly but who had a deep impact on you. The book's mix of accessible while artistic prose and a history-inspired plot influenced by the genre of magical realism leaves nothing to be desired. The book adds to the exceptional body of literature (both fictional and nonfictional) that provides a lens into the legacy of slavery. Whitehead paints vibrant pictures of the historical realities of slavery, inequity, and the quest for freedom. Some parts of the narrative are alarmingly relevant almost 200 years later. In one passage describing the policing of slaves, Whitehead writes: "The patroller required no reason to stop a person apart from color. . . . Rogue blacks who did not surrender could be shot." Sound a little familiar to how black bodies are still policed? The book's narrator goes into more detail about the systems that constantly worked to enforce the system of enslavement:

Slaves caught off the plantation need passes, unless they wanted a licking and a visit to the country jail. Free blacks carried proof of manumission or risked being conveyed into the clutches of slavery; sometimes they were smuggledto the auction block anyway. (p. 153)

Is it any wonder that such egregious racial inequalities exist today when persistent systems of violence and suppression were unilaterally sanctioned?  

Reading this book was a plethora of experiences. There was the experience of pure appreciation of the book's prose and plot. There was a huge emotional component of experiencing this book, as we follow the hardships and brutality that Cora and her collaborators endure. What also added to my experience of reading this book was a small but exciting interaction with the author on Twitter. I don't expect famous people to respond to every cray cray fan, but given how easy social networking makes it to engage with people who are legitimately engaging with literature, I really appreciated that Colson Whitehead liked one of my tweets about his book.

Exhibit A: Colson Whitehead like my Tweet!

We don't know what is in store for 2017 of course, but make sure that The Underground Railroad is in store for yourself if you have not yet read it. It is imperative that we all keep reading books that challenge our emotions and conceptions, because literature that challenges us remains one of the surest ways to expand our humanity, compassion, and knowledge. 

Whitehead, Colson. The Underground Railroad. New York: Doubleday, 2016.

Wendy Gamber's The Notorious Mrs. Clem

Hollywood: make this book into a movie right now! Wendy Gamber's The Notorious Mrs. Clem: Murder and Money in the Gilded Age has all the trappings of an Oscar-worthy period piece: murder, intrigue, fashion, epic court battles, a cameo from future U.S. President Benjamin Harrison, and at the heart of it all is sex (okay, maybe more like questions of gender) and money. 

In September 1868, a grisly murder took place in Indianapolis. A young couple was found mercilessly shot on the banks of White River at a point known as Cold Spring. As investigations of the deaths progressed, an unlikely suspect came under scrutiny: Nancy Clem, who was regarded by many as a respectable middle class wife of an upstanding local grocer. Upon closer inspection, Clem emerged as much more than a traditional nineteenth century housewife. She, in fact, was exposed as a talented and convincing con women who had widespread lending and borrowing scams throughout the city that involved an array of men and women in Indianapolis society, including the murdered couple found at Cold Spring. Her under-the-table financial connections to the couple is what lead to her arrest, as well as the arrest of one her business partners.

The Notorious Mrs. Clem is a fascinating true crime set on the stage of the Gilded Age (post-Civil War). Historian Wendy Gamber has left no archival stone unturned--newspapers, court records, city plans. You name it, and Gamber has utilized it to paint the fullest picture possible of the social, industrial, and urban landscape of Indianapolis in the 1860s and leading up to the turn of the century. The real thread of the story is the saga of court cases as Mrs. Clem is tried and retried due to mistrials and appeals. But what seems to be on trial is not Mrs. Clem's guilt for murder, it is whether or not she is a good woman and wife. The prosecution and defense developed opposing arguments, but they both equally centered on how wifeliness and womanly virtue is connected to money and business dealings. Gamber puts it best:

          Competing interpretations of the political economy of marriage were central to the   

          narratives constructed by her prosecution and defense. They echoed a cultural 

          conversation that took place in many arenas--in feminist demands; in statehouses, 

          as legislators contemplated revised married women's property acts and earning    

          laws; in courts, as judges considered women's claims; and in myriad negotiations 

          between husbands and wives. (p. 244)    

Facts of the murder were at play in the trial; however, opening statements, witnesses, and closing statements had a running theme of whether Mrs. Clem's financial acumen (she was financially self-sufficient as a widow prior to marrying the upstanding grocer) was brazen or praiseworthy.

It is not every day that a book steeped in such careful research and archival work can also achieve the level of page-turner, but this is one of those marvelous cases. Nancy Clem, of course, if not the only women whose trial was sensationalized and called into question factors outside of mere guilt or innocence. From Lizzy Borden to Jodi Arias, the media continues to create a spectacle of women murderers, calling on trite tropes of femininity, purity, and sanity that are often present in the very trial records themselves. A book like The Notorious Mrs. Clem contributes to a genealogy of society's unfortunate preoccupations with gender stereotypes and how they are reliably institutionalized through the legal system. It is also a compelling story that will leave you wondering about Mrs. Clem and her mysterious business dealings. 

Gamber, Wendy. The Notorious Mrs. Clem: Murder and Money in the Gilded Age. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2016. 

BookExpo America 2016

I had the opportunity to attend BookExpo America, and while I have been to various book events before, none were as big as BEA, and certainly none as commercial. The 2016 Expo took place May 11 to 13 at McCormick Place, Chicago. I went on the last day of the Expo and could not have been more pleased about the fantastic books and ARCs I picked up! It was a smorgasbord of book totes, engaging discussions with book industry folks, and bookish swag (like artistic literary postcards from Obvious State).

One of my favorite takeaways from the meeting was a journal. I do not journal (despite best attempts), but this is a notebook that I just could not resist: it is a novel journal. The lined journal pages actually contain all the lines from classical literary favorites. Available from Thunder Bay Press's Canterbury Classics imprint, these journals are a clever concept and also struck me as well made, with covers soft to the touch. I picked up the Great Expectations journal.

I was also quite excited to learn about a relatively new book app from the same folks that founded the Out of Print clothing company. Their app is called Litsy, and I think think their tagline sums it up best: "Where books make friends." While I've only been using Litsy for the last 2 days since I first learned about the app, it is a bit like if Twitter and Instagram had an adorable little bookish social networking baby. Find me on Litsy with the username @ReadosaurusText, and learn more about Litsy from their engaged Twitter feed @getlitsy.

I cannot understate how incredibly enthusiastic I am about the stack of new books I picked up to read! My first objective was to find the Europa Editions booth--they are one of my favorite publishers because they consistently publish high quality literary fiction from international authors. When I found Europa Editions, I was delighted to discover they were having a signing! In addition to getting a copy of Sergio Y. signed by author Alexandre Vidal Porto, I was also given a copy of Animals by Emma Jane Unsworth. Northwestern University Press had hot-off-the-press copies of The Fiftieth Anniversary Edition of Biography of a Runaway Slave. I picked up a copy of Redskins: Insult and Brand by C. Richard King from University of Nebraska Press. And yes, in the background of the picture, that is a t-shirt for University of Georgia Press's new book, Blood, Bone, and Marrow: A Biography of Harry Crews by Ted Geltner.

I received a number of advance review copies, which I am listing here along with their release dates. Stay tuned for posts about these books!



August 2016

Ulitskaya, Ludmila. The Kukotsky Enigma. Trans. Diana Nemec Ignashev. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

September 2016
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Here I Am. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
Gray, Sarah. A Life Everlasting: The Extraordinary Gift of Thomas Ethan Gray. New York: HarperOne.
Mazzeo, Tilar J. Irena's Children: A True Story of Courage. New York: Gallery Books.

October 2016
Bennett, Britt. The Mothers. New York: Riverhead Books.
Günday, Hakan. More. Trans. Zeynep Beler. New York: Arcade Publishing.
Szalay, David. All That Man Is. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press.
Whitehead, Colson. The Underground Railroad. New York: The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Punctuated Post: Amara Lakhous' Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet

Ever since I was introduced to Europa Editions, they have been my go-to publisher for international fiction, and especially translations of contemporary literature. My latest discovery from the publisher came at the Modern Language Association meeting in January. Penguin was there (they distribute for Europa Editions) selling paperback books for $3.00. Now, do not get me wrong, these books are worth every penny of the usual $15.00 to $18.00 they usually cost, but there is no way I could pass up a book deal that good, especially when I noticed the adorable cover of Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet by Amara Lakhous and translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein.

The book is truly charming. Lakhous, an award-winning author, manages to strike a smart balance between depth and humor--usually a tricky task. A lighthearted Italian novel about multiculturalism and a missing piglet, it is at once whimsical and prying as to the issues surrounding immigration, labor, and day-to-day life. Anyone who reads this will be able to see the obvious similarities to immigration debates in the United States along with the hypocrisies of xenophobia. I quite liked a book review from The Independent that both overviewed the plot and spoke to its literary contributions.

Lakhous, Amara. Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet. Trans. by Ann Goldstein. New York: Europa Editions, 2014.

Professional Development Panel

This morning, at 11 am, it is my honor to present on a professional development panel with Dr. Antoinette Burton (professor of history, UIUC) and Dr. Carina Ray (professor of African and Afro-American studies, Brandeis). The panel will take place at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Graduate Symposium on Women's and Gender History. We'll discuss preparing papers for publication, transitioning to the tenure track, and revising your dissertation into a book.

Of course, when the panel was planned, we had no idea that we'd be presenting at the same time as a Bernie Sanders rally elsewhere on campus!

Reading Matters@IPRH Post: "Go Set a Watchwoman"

I'm very excited to have had the opportunity to contribute a post to the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities Reading Matters blog. The post, titled "Go Set a Watchwoman," gave me an opportunity to air my grievances with the popular media, whose preoccupation with Finch as a racist completely undermined the merits of Scout's actions and sacrificed the narrative of our heroine and led to a male-centric focus on the book.

(originally posted to Reading Matters@IPRH blog January 22, 2016)

Lee, Harper. Go Set a Watchman. New York: HarperCollins, 2015.

New Book: Sabine N. Meyer's We Are What We Drink: The Temperance Battle in Minnesota

A book about the battle over the bottle in the Twin Cities.
We Are What We Drink: The Temperance Battle in Minnesota
by Sabine N. Meyer
University of Illinois Press, 2015

Focusing on the Twin Cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota, Sabine Meyer's We Are What We Drink intertwines national, regional, and urban history during the Progressive era, along with the political motivations and legislative actions at the city and state level in Minnesota, to unravel the temperance movement’s relationship to and effect on identity constructions as well as social, ethnic, racial, religious and political elements.  Covering a 100-year period (1819-1919), the project shows the ways that we are what we drink by examining the formation of civic identities of the cities themselves, Irish and German immigrants, and women in the public sphere and how the groups' involvement in the temperance movement helped to shape their categories of identity and establish a civic role: German immigrants continued to support public drinking to uphold their heritage; Irish immigrants joined religious forces to condemn drinking and to embed themselves in their new homeland; and women sought to protect the domestic sphere by moving their fight into the public sphere. Meanwhile, each Twin City had opposite stances on temperance with St. Paul being liquor friendly and Minneapolis being a hotbed for the liquor reform movement.

Meyer draws on a vast range of primary source materials including newspaper and court archival records and situates her own work within relevant scholarship on temperance, civic identity, Minnesota history, Irish and German American ethnic identity, and construction of female identity in the public sphere. In doing so, Meyer provides a thorough overview about how the role of drink and the attempt to regulate drink in connection with a social movement influenced local, ethnic, and gender identity construction.

This is one of the first books I acquired, and so I am especially pleased to see it out. If you think the cover is awesome, wait until you read what's on the inside!

The Crisis in the Dominican Republic: A Reading List

There is a humanitarian crisis that has been evolving in the Dominican Republic, and it is perplexing why more people aren't talking about it because of its significance regarding law, race, and basic human rights. For decades, Haitians have moved to the Dominican Republic, oftentimes to escape poverty in Haiti. Discrimination against people of Haitian descent is intense in the Dominican Republic (there was a lynching earlier this year), and in 2013 the Dominican Republic courts denied citizenship to all descendants of Haitian-born parents, impacting tens of thousands of people, some of whom have spent their entire lives in the Dominican Republic. Recently, there was news media coverage of authors Junot Diaz and Edwidge Danticat speaking out about the situation. There is a link to that article below, along with other articles assembled along a timeline that provide a sense of the situation, especially over the past several months as thousands of people face statelessness.

October 15, 2012 article about 1937 event: Parsley Massacre: The Genocide that Still Haunts Haiti-Dominican Relations, International Business Times, by Palash Ghosh

October 7, 2013: The Dominican Republican and Haiti: One Island Riven by An Unresolved Past, The Guardian, by Carrie Gibson

October 24, 2013: Dominicans of Haitian Descent Cast into Legal Limbo by Court, The New York Times, by Randal C. Archibold

May 22, 2014: Dominican Republic Lawmakers Pass Citizenship Bill, BBC News

February 3, 2015: Thousands of Dominicans Woke Up This Week without Citizenship in Any Country, The Huffington Post Latino Voices, Roque Planas

February 11, 2015: Haitian Man Lynched amid Dominican Republic Immigration Controversy, The Huffington Post Latino Voices, Roque Planas

June 16, 2015: Dominicans of Haitian Descent Fear Mass Deportation as Headline Looms, The Guardian, by Sibylla Brodzinsky

June 16, 2015: Dominican Republic Threatens to Deport Haitian Families, The Root, by Nsenga K. Burton

June 25, 2015: Junot Diaz and Edwidge Danticat Jointly Speak Out Against Dominican Republic Refugee Crisis, Fusion, by Daniel Rivero

June 26, 2015: Haiti PM Warns of "Humanitarian Crisis" Caused by Dominican Deportation Policy, The Guardian, Associated Press

July 2, 2015: The Dominican Time Bomb, The New York Times Magazine, by Jonathan M. Katz

July 5, 2015: Deportations of Noncitizens in Dominican Republic Protested by Activists in Boston, The Boston Globe, by Laura Crimaldi

I have found myself turning the most to the coverage in The Guardian. (Search "Dominican Republic" on The Guardian's homepage for articles on the issue that go back several years.) How will you stay on top of news on this issue?