What Unites Us by Dan Rather

 

In these days before the 2020 election I have been reading Dan Rather's What Unites Us, recently released in paperback form. 

I was able to join Politics and Prose Bookstore's Zoom talk with Rather. He was interviewed by Jennifer Steinhauer, whose book The Firsts: The Inside Story of the Women Reshaping Congress I read a few months ago.

Rather lays out the shared values Americans which can become a platform for building consensus in our divided country. 

One person, one vote. The freedom of speech, to dissent; freedom of the press--no matter how flawed. The importance of science and knowledge, even if we disagree over specific ideas. Education. Our desire to be an empathetic people.

Rather hopes his book can be a jumping off place for dialogue, starting a much needed conversation. 

Rather harkens back to his childhood and draws from his years as a journalist. He first defines patriotism as opposed to nationalism and ends with what it means to be a citizen. 

In the Zoom talk, a listener asked Rather if the country has ever been as divided as it is today. He recalled the 1960s when rebellions and nonviolent protests erupted over war and racism. Today, he notes, protests include a broader demographic mix in age, class and ethnicity. 

"I'm a reporter who got lucky, very, very lucky," the eighty-nine-year-old Rather responded to being called a 'national treasure.' His tip for aging well? Rather replied luck, genetics, God's grace, determination, and dedicating one's life to something bigger than yourself, and finding a life companion who sticks with you through thick and thin.

Some of my favorite quotes from the book:

Dissent can sometimes be uncomfortable, but it is vital in a democracy.

Like so many others in our country, I journeyed from ignorance to tolerance to inclusion.

Empathy builds community, Communities strengthen a country and its resolve and will to fight back...I worry that our nation today suffers from a deficit of empathy, and this is especially true of many in positions of national leadership.

I remind myself and others that we have been through big challenges in the past, that it often seems darkest in the present. The pendulum of our great nations seems to have swung toward conceit and unsteadiness once again, but it is in our power to wrest it back. 

Ultimately, democracy is an action more than a belief. The people's voice, your voice, must be heard for it to have an effect.

I voted absentee last month, delivering my ballot to the city hall. 

Please--vote.

Homeland Elegies: A Novel by Ayad Akhtar

Homeland Elegies was a revelation, a chance to see American culture and history and politics from the viewpoint of an 'outsider,' even if that outsider was American born.

Ayad Akhtar  has written a novel with a strong narrative voice that reads like memoir. It's compelling storyline and conflicted characters engage the reader. It is also a novel of ideas, a dissection of social and political culture.

How Christian is America? Consider the commercialization of Christian holy days, the Christian based place names of cities, the King James Bible language and words that are woven in our writing and speech, how we do personal hygiene, dogs in every home. 

The accumulation of wealth, buying sprees dependent on credit cards and interest, and the importance of corporate wealth and the power it wields is another theme. It's a Wonderful Life, that beloved Christmas movie, the narrator realizes, was really about money and power.

Central to the novel is the experience of living in a racist culture, especially after 9-11. When the narrator's car breaks down in rural Pennsylvania, the narrator finds himself vulnerable.

The narrator travels to Pakistan to visit family. Is returning to one's family homeland the answer? The anger that fuels people here is also found abroad. 

"America is my home," the narrator affirms. 

Homeland Elegies, this poem that mourns the country of our hopes and dreams, reveals our character like a mirror. It isn't pretty. 

I was given access to a free galley by the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review. I received a final copy of the novel from a giveaway through Bookreporter.com.

Homeland Elegies: A Novel
by Ayad Akhtar
Little, Brown and Company
Pub Date: September 15, 2020   
ISBN: 9780316496438
hardcover $14.99 (USD)

from the publisher

A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home.

Ayad Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrants live in fear, and where the nation's unhealed wounds wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerrilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one -- least of all himself -- in the process.