What We Do Now: Standing Up for Your Values in Trump's America

The election of Donald Trump has been a wake-up call for complacent progressive liberals who were sure that 'it can't happen here' would never happen here. America has had its brief love affairs with the right before--Father Coughlan, Joe McCarthy, George Wallace--but as Dennis Johnson says in the introduction of  What We Do Now, "Americans have always, ultimately, resisted the call to calamity by listening, instead, to what Lincoln called 'the better angels of our nature.'"

My high school history teacher warned us that history is like a pendulum: it swings to extremes, settles in the center, but swings again. He predicted a new 'Victorian' age would follow the 1960s. And it did, and birthed the Evangelical Christian movement which was brought into the Republican party.

America established stunning progressive policies and elected the first non-white president. Concomitant, another movement was afoot which candidate Trump tapped into, and now in power, government is being dismantled by old rich white men in the name of the disenfranchised masses who put them in power.

What do progressives do now? "How can the defeated majority rouse itself to overcome its sincere grief and disillusionment?" Johnson asks.

Twenty-seven progressive leaders in brief essays offer strategies and hope for the struggle ahead.

Part One, Setting a New Liberal Agenda, begins with an essay on financial reform by Senator (and presidential candidate) Bernie Sanders. After the 'too big to fail bailout' three of the largest financial institutions are 80% bigger than before the bailout. Teddy Roosevelt, he writes, would say "Break 'em up."

Remarks to the AFL-CIO Executive Council by Senator Elizabeth Warren addresses the major issues facing Americans today, and reminds that 72% of Americans believe "the American economy is rigged to advantage the rich and powerful," including tax breaks for billionaires while rejecting a minimum living wage.

David Cole of the ACLU calls for an engaged citizenry and vigilant media and reminds that grassroots protests and activism can push change.

Racial Justice articles include Cornell William Brooks of the NAACP concerning voting rights and Brittany Packnett of Campaign Zero and Teach for America calling on white people to become aware of the privilege that protects them and to confront it.

Concerning Immigration,  Ilhan Omar, Somali American member of the Minnesota House of Representatives, reminds us that we are all emigrants and Cristina Jimenez of United We Dream addresses Undocumented immigrants.

Gloria Steinem's article under Women's Rights calls on media to take responsibility and rallies women to boycott Trump interests. Ilyse Houe of the NARAL reminds that "the history of social movements shows that the path to justice and equality is always marked by setbacks" and calls for women to take on leadership.

Civil Liberties articles include Anthony D. Romero of the ACLU calling to defend the Constitution and Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation addressing free speech and digital security under Trump.

Environmentalist Bill McKibben essay on Climate Change says science is not 'opinion' and "one man is preparing to bet the future of the planet in a long-shot wager against physics." Sierra Club director Michael Brune reminds that the president can't "alter the fact that both public opinion and the marketplace strongly favor clean energy" and calls to fight on state and local levels.

Religious Freedom is addressed by Linda Sarsour of the Arab American Association of New York who begins, "I am a Palestinian-Arab-Muslim-American, daughter of immigrants, a political activist, and a woman--basically, you don't want to be me in 2016." She calls for "perpetual outrage" at systemic and religious profiling and working on relationships. Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum's pastoral essay on grief also reminds of small victories, She encourages education, strengthening personal faith, and connecting with others. M. Dove Kent, director of Jews for Racial & Economic Justice shares what she has learned about turning fear into power: grassroots organizing, focusing on the local level, partnering for the common good, understanding paths to power, participation, reconsidering financial paths of support, and working together.

Economics writers include Paul Krugman of the New York Times who warns against the belief that America has a divine providence that always returns to justice. Quietism and turning from politics is dangerous. Economist and professor Robert Reich, with experience as Clinton's Secretary of Labor and working under Presidents Ford and Carter, offers a first 100 days resistance agenda. I found his essay the most focused on direct actions citizen can take, with 14 points. John R. MacArthur of Harper's Magazine wants to "make blue states blue again." He considers free trade deals impact on American workers.

LGBTQ Rights essays include Rea Carey of the National LGBTQ Task Force, writes, "Let's dust each other off and start our journey again...together." Mara Keisling of the National Center for Transgender Equality calls to continue the fight for justice.

Media Malpractice 2016 by Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation calls for an accountable media that puts public interest over profit, and an obliteration of lines between news and entertainment.  Allan J. Lichtman of American University considers the misuse of polls by the media. I found his article of particular interest with its critique of the failure of Democrats and insight into what the party should do next and his call for a new way of campaigning with articulated policy. (Amen!) Author George Saunders addresses 'the Megaphone,' how ideas become dominant and change thought. "What I propose...is simply: awareness of the Megaphonic tendency, and discussion of same." In other words, Media Literacy.

Part Two is Reframing the Message. Linguist George Lakoff breaks down how "Trump used the brains of people listening to him to his advantage" through repetition, framing, familiar examples, grammar, and metaphor. It is a fascinating essay. He then considers how the media is complicate and how journalists can become more accurate in language. His example is that regulations protect public from harm and fraud; calling for an end of 'regulations' sounds less threatening that calling for an end to 'protections.'

Nato Thompson of Creative Time essay on the role of Artists and Social Justice reminds that artists articulate what it means to feel in this world and that their work is vital.

Dave Eggers' essay Travels Through Post-Election America in the Coda, to me, was particularly meaningful. He writes about his encounters with Trump America, including in Detroit, sharing people's stories. 110,000 Michigan voters did not choose a presidential candidate. Clinton lost Michigan by 13,107 votes. Those are telling statistics. Eggers writes, "Because the voting had split so dramatically along racial lines, how could an African American of Latino pass a white person on the street..and not wonder, "Which side are you on?"

That really got to me. It was my life after the election. Knowing my county went Democratic but my state put Trump in the White House, I felt, well, guilty. We went to a multi-cultural Thanksgiving community event at a Buddhist Temple where we heard grateful refugees tell harrowing stories.

I was extra nice to the people of color in line at Aldi, to the immigrant clerk at CVS. And I noted that others were also on better, more aware behavior. A man held a door open for me, respectfully, as if to say "I don't denigrate women." People were small talking. My community is small town like, but we usually proscribe to 'don't look 'em in the eye, don't talk to them.' I felt we were telling each other messages, making connections, countering the threat of hate.

Perhaps there is hope. If we can see each other, know each other, help each other, fight for each other. Maybe we will be stronger for this setback.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

What We Do Now: Standing Up for Your Values in Trump's America
ed. Dennis Johnson
Melville House

You Can Take the Girl Out Of Tonawanda, But Can You Take Tonawanda Out Of the Girl?

In June, 1963 my family moved from Tonawanda to my grandparent's house in Royal Oak, Michigan. Everything had been packed the day before and we slept on the floor with only pillows and blankets in the empty living room. The movers loaded up our possessions and then we piled into our car for the six hour trip from Niagara Falls to Detroit, across the flat Ontario farmland we knew so well from many other trips.

Most of our possessions were stored in my grandparent's garage but I had my Barbie doll case with Barbie, Midge, and Ken and all their clothes. Next door to my grandparents lived Doug and Mary M. and their children Larry and Gail. Gail was a year younger than I. A few years previous when visiting my grandparents I had seen Gail's Barbie and I asked Mom for one. I never cared for baby dolls, but I loved dressing fashion dolls. Gail and her friends from down the street and I played dolls on Gail's front porch all summer.

My Ramer Grandparents at the left in their back yard, the
sleeping porch can be seen on the second story

My Grandparent's house on Gardenia

My grandparent's house had a second story, screened summer sleeping porch off the master bedroom. I was first put in a bedroom at the front of the house near the street. Gardenia was on a hill and traffic came down the hill too fast and too noisy; I could not sleep. So, a cot was put on the sleeping porch and it became my bedroom. I loved, loved, loved it.

Pepper in her later years

The porch overlooked the yard, dense with tall trees. Blue Jays and Fox squirrels played among the branches. It was great being reunited with my dog Pepper who had been living with my grandparents for several years. Pepper loved to chase the squirrels up a tree, and they would chatter down and tease her, just out of reach. The sunlight penetrated the tree leaves in shafts of light, dappling the ground below. I was listening to the radio and playing on the sleeping porch when I heard that the Bald Eagle was endangered. It was an awakening.

my grandfather's bookcase in my house

I did not have books to read so I looked over my grandfather's bookshelf. He had a Globe-Werneke barrister bookcase, bought while at college; I've had that bookcase since 1972. Some of the books I found there was an illustrated children's book of Hiawatha and Bambi and 101 Famous Poems, which I read so often that Gramps gave it to me. I wrote about it here.

Mom would give me a quarter and I would walk down Gardenia and cross Main Street to buy comic books from the drug store. Although other comics were cheaper, I always wanted a Classics Illustrated Comic Book. I read them over and over. My favorites included Lord Jim, Les Miserables, and Jane Eyre.

Mom would take me to Frenz and Sons hardware, also at Gardenia and Main, where I would buy Barbie clothes.  And when Mom and Grandma went to the Hollywood Market near downtown Royal Oak I could choose a toy, plastic sets of model dogs or knights and horses, or glittery, plastic high heels that always broke, or a coloring book. Once when pondering my choices a nice lady stopped to talk to me. She said I would grow up to be a very pretty girl. That stuck with me because usually, I heard I would be "so pretty if" I lost weight! It was a cherished affirmation.

That summer the entire family, three generations, watched Sing Along with Mitch Miller, and we did sing along. I watched local Detroit shows like George Pierrot's Presents, a travel show, and Twin Pine's Milky the Clown. I hated Soupy Sales. I saw the first Outer Limits show at my grandparent's house that fall.

When school started Mom drove me to Northwood Elementary school. My parents were buying a house near that school, but we did not move in until several weeks into the school year.

Life had been busy and fun and like an extended vacation. But with school, the implications of moving became harder.

Northwood Elementary school was built in 1923, unlike my brand new school in Tonawanda. (Northwood was pulled down in 2008 and a new complex built on the site.) There were staircases to climb to get to my classroom on the second floor. Large windows filled the classroom with light.

At r, cess the kids ran up and down the large playground's hill. They played 4-Square, a game I had never heard of before. The kids chalked a large square on the asphalt or cement, divided into four smaller squares. A kid was in each square, and they bounced a ball into a square and that kid had to bounce it into some other square.

My Sixth Grade Class at Northwood Elementary School

I was shy and introverted, unable to just join in. I preferred to watch the bumblebees gather pollen from the wildflowers along the fence.

I really liked my first male teacher, Mr. Raymond Saffronoff.  We had "New Math" and for the first time I actually did well in math. We learned about Michigan flora and fauna in preparation for a spring visit to Kensington Nature Park; on the trip I saw a Pileated Woodpecker!I worked on a report about birds.

I enjoyed music class where we learned folk songs from around the world. I would gaze at the piano, longing to play it. I missed playing the piano so much.

My Sixth Grade year was punctuated by events I never forgot: The Kennedy assassination and the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. The Beatles because I did not like their music, which seemed inane to me: I Wanna Hold Your Hand, Yeah Yeah Yeah. But all my classmates loved them, making me feel even more of an outsider.  But several years previous, after hearing Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Tiny Polkadot Bikini on the car radio when Janet L.'s sister Ruth drove us to Summer Camp at Herbert Hoover Jr High, I had promised my Grandmother Gochenour I would never like Rock and Roll. I meant to keep my word.

On Friday afternoon our class visited the school library. From its stacks of older books I took home children's classics like The Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan, and the Oz books. At Philip Sheridan the library was full of newly published books, now become classics. At Northwood I discovered the vintage classics.

On that Friday of November 22, 1963, Mr. Saffronoff and took us from the library back to our classroom. He said that the president had been shot and that we were to go home early.

It was a long, frightening walk home. I did not know if the Russians would take over our country because our leader was dead. I did not know if our parents could protect us. I had not felt this dread since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Over the next days, the adults were all glued to the television set. On the day of President Kennedy's funeral my family gathered at my grandparent's house to watch it on TV. I saw young John salute his daddy and felt bad for little Caroline.

After we moved from my grandparent's home I still saw Gail but had not made new friends at Northwood or on Houstonia. I was growing more homesick all the time. Nancy Ensminger and I wrote letters, and I saw her and my cousins when we visited Tonawanda. But life was lonely and boring. I know I complained and Dad would suggest I go out and start up a baseball game. I thought he was crazy. I didn't know how to play baseball. We didn't have a ball or bat or glove. And I was too shy to start up anything.

I was too young to realize that my family were all dealing with homesickness and adjusting to their new lives, too. Grandma Gochenour missed her church friends, her lifelong friend Annie Hooverman, and her family. Mom's health was not good and Dad worked two jobs. Grandma finally decided to return to Tonawanda and live with Aunt Alice and Uncle Kenny.

My yellow bedroom

When we first moved into the Houstonia house Mom decorated a bedroom for me with yellow walls. I had a display case for my Beyer horse collection and a bookcase for my books. There was a walk-in closet with shelves where I stored my Classic Comic Books. The windows faced the east, and on summer mornings the sunlight streamed in. Grandma Gochenour and my little brother Tom had first floor bedrooms and my folks were in the other upstairs bedroom.

My Aunt Nancy and Uncle Joe lived in Lincoln Park and my cousin Sue was just a few years younger than me. So I did have one cousin nearby to play with.

Showing my cousin Sue my 1963 Christmas Presents

After Grandma Gochenour moved back to Tonawanda my brother could not be alone on the first floor, so he was moved into my bedroom and I was moved into the small, first floor bedroom. It was near the back of the house. The window faced the pear tree in the back yard. When it rained the gutter clattered and kept me awake. I had a transistor radio and would listen to it in bed in the dark, amazed to hear stations from all over the country.

Summer came. I had no friends to play with, there were no kids gathering for games of Mother-May-I or Red Light, Green Light, nothing to do. I discovered classic movies on Bill Kennedy's Showtime.

I had always loved television, but these old movies became my passion. Jimmy Stewart in Harvey and It's a Wonderful Life; Blood and Sand and The Sun Also Rises with Tyrone Power; Gregory Peck in The Snows of Kilimanjaro; Errol Flynn in Captain Blood! I didn't understand what was going on between 'men and women' but I loved the action scenes and the funny parts.

*****

At the end of the school year a mimeographed booklet was published by the student council. It included jokes, class prophecies, and such. My copy is faded and I transcribed it a few years back.

Highlights of 1963-1964 were listed as:

• Governor Romney is the governor of Michigan.
• President Johnson is fast becoming popular
• R. Nixon-B. Goldwater are the chief candidates for president (Republican)
• New York has a World's Fair this year
• Our class helped plant trees on the playground
• We had a big awards assembly out on the playground
• In November we collected 75 bundles for Bundle Days
• Alaska was shaken by a huge earthquake on March 27, 1964 (Good Friday)
• We collected 64 dollars for the United Foundation
• On Mary 25, 1964 we had an assembly honoring Michigan Week
• Another terrible tornado hit the Anchor Bay area in May 1964
• For Arbor Day '64; we planted ten trees, one of which is the Red Maple from Mrs. White.
• We had an assembly on May 17, 1964 honoring the Student Council, Audio Visual Club, Squad Patrols, and the Service Squad. Band and Stings played at the Assembly.
• We collected many, many cans for food for the needy over Thanksgiving last November.

The class will said I would leave my horse books to another girl in the class, and my prophecy was to become "an olive stuffer", which I found offensive. I figured it either meant I was too stupid to do anything else or that I would be stuffing the olives into my mouth to eat!

My Sixth Grade class did not all go to the same junior high school. Many in the booklet I came to know later in high school. It was just a one year stop on the way for me.

*****

1964 was the year of the elephant jokes.

How do you get an elephant out of a bowl of custard?
Read the directions on the back of the package.

What's big, gray, and lumpy?
Elephant Tapioca.

What was the elephant doing on the highway?
Oh, about 84 miles per hour.

Why do elephants lay on their backs in the water and stick their feet in the air?
So you can tell them from a bar of soap.

What happens when an elephant steps on some grapes?
It lets out a little wine.

What's gray and has a trunk?
An elephant leaving town.

When an elephant sits on your fence what time is it?
Time to get a new fence.

Old Lady: Must I stick the stamp on myself?
Post Office Employee: No, stick it on the envelope.

Patient: Every time I drink a cup of coffee I get a sharp pain in my eye. What should I do?
Doctor: Just take the spoon out of the cup.

Policeman: You are under arrest for speeding.
Motorist: I wasn't speeding but I passed a couple of fellow who were.

First Dragon: Am I late for supper?
Second Dragon: Yes, everyone's eaten.

What's giant, purple, and lives in the sea?
Moby Plum

What holds the moon up?
Moonbeams

What is green and flies in the sky?
Super Pickle

Why does a traffic light turn red?
You'd turn red too if you had to change in front of all those people.

+

The First Black Superstar: Ethel Waters

An autobiography of Ethel Waters, His Eye Is On The Sparrow was published in 1951 when Waters was staring in Member of the Wedding. The book was a best seller.

I found a ragged and yellowed 1951 copy of the book on a free shelf at a library used book sale several years ago. I did not really know anything about Ethel Waters. Photographs from her stage plays inside the cover showed scenes from Mamba's Daughters, Pinky, The Member of the Wedding, and As Thousands Cheer. I brought the book home with me, willing to learn more about this African American entertainer.

What I discovered was a heart-wrenching, raw story that one wishes was pure fiction. Ethel's voice is strong in some places, while at times Samuels' voice puts her emotions into beautiful, if unauthentic, words. As an 'ofay' reading the book I felt my otherness. Ethel's black pride was fierce. It took many years before she would trust the white theater and movie establishment. She disdained whites as boring and ingenuine. Yet she also spoke to our common humanity.

"I never was a child. I was never coddled, or liked, or understood by my family. I never felt I belonged. I was always an outsider...Nobody brought me up." 

Ethel thought her 'mixed blood' may have explained her 'badness' as a child. Her great-grandfather Albert Harris was from India; he bought the freedom of her 'fair' great-grandmother. Albert had to protect his children during the Fugitive Slave Law years when Southerners kidnapped free African American children to be sold into slave states.

Their daughter Sarah Harris, Ethel's grandmother, went into service with a Pennsylvania family. First they educated her so she could pass the law stating that 'persons of Negro blood' could not be taken from Maryland unless 'competent and intelligent'.  At age 13 she married Louis Anderson, who had been a child drum major in the Civil War and came from a Germantown, PA family. He became an alcoholic, and Sally left him taking their children Viola, Charlie, and Louise. A proud woman, Sally was a hard worker whose jobs working live-in for white families left the children alone.

Louise wanted to be an evangelist while her siblings Vi and Charles were wild. When John Waters asked Vi if Louise was 'broke in yet' Vi told him when to come to the house. At age twelve, Louise was raped. John's mother, who passed as white and was well off, denied her son would do such a thing. Waters was a pianist who died a few years later.

Ethel was born in 1900 in Chester, PA. Her mother Sallie was a thirteen-year-old child with an unwanted baby who looked like the man who raped her. Sallie's beloved church cast her out. She left Ethel in her mother's care and went to work.

Ethel called her grandmother Sally 'Mom' and her mother Louise 'Momweeze.' Ethel's grandmother Mom had to leave her in the care of her aunts and uncle while she worked, but they were busy themselves, working days and partying at night. Ethel was shuffled about 'like a series of one-night stands' from Camden, NJ to Philadelphia to Chester. Ethel tells about battles with bedbugs and rats, being given whiskey to put her to sleep before her aunts went out at night, sleeping on the street, living in Philadelphia's red-light district and running errands for 'the whores', playing with the children of thieves and pimps, surrounded by junkies. She became 'the best child thief' in the Bloody Eighth Ward.

"My vile tongue was my shield, my toughness, my armor."

Watching her aunts drunkenness and watching the death of a teenage relative from syphilis were object lessons to Ethel. She avoided drink, smoking, and prostitution but was a hardened, street-wise survivor.

Ethel was big for her age, tall and thin, passing for being older. She began singing and 'shimming' on Negro vaudeville stages in Philly. At age seventeen, billed as Sweet Mama Stringbean, she appeared in Baltimore. She had a 'sweet, bell-like voice' and had 'developed into a really agile shimmy shaker' who 'knew how to roll and quiver, and my hips would become whirling dervishes.' She teamed with the Hill Sisters and was the first woman to perform the St. Louis Blues. They went on a cross-country tour, joining a carnival when stranded.

She was shocked by the Jim Crow South.

"I have the soundest of reasons for being proud of my people. We Negroes have always had such a tough time that our very survival in this white world with the dice always loaded against us is the greatest possible testimonial to our strength, our courage, and our immunity to adversity."

"I am not bitter and angry at white people. I say in all sincerity that I am sorry for them. What could be more pitiful than to live in such nightmarish terror of another race that you have to punch them, push them off sidewalks, and never be able to relax your venomous hatred for one moment? As I see it, it is these people, the Ku-Kluxers, the White Supremacists, and the other fire-spitting neurotics who are in the deep trouble."

One of the pivotal moment in Ethel's experiences in the South was befriending the family of a boy who was lynched for talking back to a white man. She later took that grief and turned it into art when singing Super Time in As Thousands Cheer on Broadway.

a young Ethel Waters

Ethel became a musical star in Harlem, in revues, on stage, in night clubs, and the movies. She explains that her art was drawn from her life experiences. Her hit song Stormy Weather offered her emotional release.

"When I got out there in the middle of the Cotton Club floor I was telling the things I couldn't frame in words. I was singing the story of my misery and confusion, of the misunderstandings in my life I couldn't straighten out, the story of the wrongs and outrages done to my by people I had loved and trusted. Your imagination can carry you just so far. Only those who have been hurt deeply can understand what pain is, or humiliation."

"I sang Stormy Weather from the depths of a private hell in which I was being crushed and suffocated." 

In Mamba's Daughters Ethel was able to play her mother's story through the character Hagar. She felt it was the pinnacle of her career, for she was not 'acting' but sharing her feeling about "what it is to be a colored woman, dumb, ignorant, all boxed up and feeling everything with such intenseness that she is half crazy." She believed she was expressing the things her mother had felt, and wanted, and sought.

The book traces her career and her salary, her men and friends, her maternal love that took in children, and her deep faith and charitable gifts. She had her ups and her downs, years when she seemed forgotten to be followed by greater success. She achieved many 'firsts' including developing 'scat' before it was 'scat.'

The book ends in 1950 but Ethel lived another 27 years. She was on a television series, Beulah, and appeared as a guest singer on other shows. In 1959 her religious faith found focus and she toured with the Billy Graham Crusade for fifteen years.

The book has been criticized for it's faults, such as the insistence on including her salary for every job. And yet those 'boring' monetary figures would have been of great importance to a self-made woman. It is only from the position of privilege that we can dismiss this aspect of her life as superfluous.

I am glad I picked up this homeless book. I found myself gong online to learn about the Black Bottom, the shimmy, the songs (like Shake That Thing) that made Ethel famous. I learned much.

His Eye is on the Sparrow an Autobiography by Ethel Waters and Charles Samuels
Doubleday & Company, Inc
1951

The Science of Popularity: Hit Makers by Derek Thompson

In his grandparent's home in Metro Detroit, Derek Thompson's mother sang him a lullaby in German. He later realized the song was not a unique family tradition, but the universally popular Brahms lullaby, "Lullaby, and good night," published in 1868.

Thompson asks, how did this tune spread world-wide? There were no radio broadcasts, recordings, or cable television to disseminate the song. It was brought to America in the late 19th c by immigrant Germans.

Thompson then turns his attention to art, presenting the history of famous impressionist paintings, collected by wealthy artist Caillebotte, and donated to France. These paintings by artists like Manet and Monet were the ones that did not sell; now these artists and paintings are now considered the core group of artists we call Impressionists. How did the paintings no one wanted to buy become recognized as the great examples of Impressionist art?

Can popularity be predicted, manufactured, or marketed? How do ideas and fads spread? Why do some things catch on while others fail? How has the information age changed how popularity spreads?

In The Hit Makers Atlantic editor Derek Thompson presents interesting historical and contemporary examples of successful 'hits' that illustrate how success works.

I was captivated and fascinated by this book. The implications of Thompson's analysis has universal applications, including psychology, sociology, entertainment, and business.

Thompson explains that people feel comfortable with what they know--but familiarity gets stale. People reject something that is too outside their comfort level. Creators and Makers have to tweak the familiar to make it new, but not too new.

Means to becoming a hit includes the repetition of catch words that make speeches or advertising memorable; building on an existing fan base to guarantees users; and popular individuals influencing millions through social media.

I will be mulling this over for a long time as I watch for emerging 'hits' and think about how they came to be.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction
Derek Thompson
Penguin Press
Publication Feb 7, 2017
$28 hard cover
ISBN: 9781101980323

"For All Refugees, Everywhere"

Viet Thanh Nguyen's 2015 novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize in Literature. His new book is Refugees, short stories that explore the refugee experience and are informed by his own family history.

After the Communist take over of Viet Nam in 1975 Nguyen's family was part of the 3 million who fled the country; 800,000 refugees left by boat. They endured days at sea, pirate attacks, and suffered from lack of water and food. Under Communism, those who remained faced persecution and imprisonment in reeducation camps. Nguyen's family was settled in a Pennsylvania refugee camp. They eventually moving to Harrisburg, PA then relocated to San Jose, CA, where they started a Vietnamese grocery.

These stories are deeply moving. People are haunted by the past, uncomfortable in new cultures. Their very appearance makes them stand out as different.

The narrator in Black-Eyed Woman comes from a family haunted by ghosts. She finds it ironic that she has made a career as a ghost-writer. She is visited by her brother's ghost who has come because she has tried to forget the past, but she can't forget the horror of war and what happened on the blue boat that altered their lives forever. In a few pages and flashes of memories we understand the refugee experience and the cost of survival.

The Other Man is about Liem who in 1975 arrives in San Francisco to meet his sponsors, a gay couple. He dreads telling his story one more time, and has created a 'short' version. The letters between Liem and his parents project happy, idealized versions of their lives. Liem considers how he will send postcards, photos of Chinatown New Years, and talk about his friends. His parents write that the family has been re-educated and, forgiven, have donated their homes to the revolution. Neither are able to be truthful.

The teenage girl in War Years pushes her traditional parents to sell American foods in their grocery where they sell Jasmine rice and star anise, fish sauce and red chilies, rock sugar, tripe and chicken hearts. Her mother has resisted Mrs Hoa's pressure to contribute to a fund for the guerrilla army made of former South Vietnamese soldiers who are planning a revolution to resurrect the Republic of the South--Until she sees what Mrs. Hoa's life is like and understands what she has sacrificed.

Arthur's garage is filled with knock-off high-end merchandise. In The Transplant, Arthur is duped by a grifter pretending to be his liver donor.

I'd Love You to Want Me concerns aging Professor Khanh whose memory is slipping  to an alternative reality where he married his true love instead of going through the arranged marriage to the dutiful wife who now cares for him.

The Americans considers identity and the search for home from another angle. African American James Carver served in Viet Nam. His Japanese wife insists they visit his daughter Claire who lives in Vietnam. James only knowledge of the country was from forty thousand feet as he flew over on bombing missions. He can't understand why his daughter has chosen to live in a backwater village to teach. Claire can't make him understand how she never felt accepted in the States, did not fit into any pigeon-hold of race, and how she needed to make restitution for the damage he had wrecked on the country during the war.

A divorced son moves in with his elderly father in Someone Else Besides You. The son had watched his father's infidelities to his arranged marriage wife. Concerned he will turn out like his dad, he has resisted his wife's desire to have a child. The father interferes, trying to get the kids back together; They learn the wife is not only pregnant, but she had visited their homeland of Vietnam.

Mr. Ly has two families in Fatherland-- the first wife who took their children and immigrated to the United States, and the replacement wife and children all named for his first children. When his eldest daughter comes to visit from the US, the younger daughter with the same name hopes her sister will sponsor her to come to America. The father had been a capitalist, and at war's end was sent to a labor camp where confessions were extracted as part of his re-education. The truth of their history and life is revealed, impacting the family dynamics.

As a genealogist I am always aware of how I got to 'here.' I think of my grandparents and great-grandparents and eighth great-grandparents. They moved across Europe, leaving their war-torn homeland and fleeing war and religious persecution. Drawn to the promise of America, they crossed the ocean, searched for new communities that would accept them, and made my life possible. We are all descended from refugees.

I am glad to have read these stories, especially in light of  the world refugee crisis today and the current administration's push against acceptance of refugees.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Refugees
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Grove Atlantic Press
February 2017
$25 hard cover
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2639-9

Eugene Gochenour's Memoirs: Chrysler Stories Continued

Dad took a new position at Chrysler and made lifelong friends. He also shared some stories that are legendary in our family.

The Windshield Wiper Lab
"I started work as a mechanic at the Windshield Wiper Lab, which was part of the Air Conditioning Lab. There were two other mechanics, and it was small room. The room had benches and cabinets and dynamometers on each wall with very little space between for us. It was very cramped. One whole wall of the room was windows that separated us from a room with about thirty mechanics in it.

Dave M. and Terry H. were the names of the two mechanics I worked with. Dave had worked with Chrysler since 1941. Chrysler had never manufactured an electric motor before and it was our lab's job to design and develop one. My work there consisted of building experimental motors, and dynamometer testing them and others supplied from vendors.

The engineers I worked with were Emile N. and Paul V. Emile designed an armature winder and a magnet charger and I assembled it. It was quite a challenge because nothing like it existed on a small scale.

Terry and I became good friends and he helped me to learn the job. He was a heavy smoker and one day as he was running a test on the dynamometer I took the cigarette he had set in an ash tray and set it where he could not see it. The ash tray was behind him as he worked and he turned around and lit another, and set that one in the ash tray and then went back to his test. I sat that cigarette by the other I had hid, and when he turned around he lit another one and set it down! After the fourth cigarette I sat them all in the ash tray and when he turned and saw them all sitting there he looked surprised then laughed when he realized what had happened.

The Boat
Terry had a son named John and he was Tom's age. Sometimes the four of us would go camping and fishing at the Old Orchard campground by the Ausable River. Terry eventually bought an old house trailer and parked it at the same park and then we all stayed there.

The Montgomery Ward store at Hazel Park had an ad for a 12-ft aluminum boat for $152 dollars and Terry and I both decided to buy one. We bought them on the same day and I hauled his to his house then returned and brought mine home. Tom and I used it for fishing and when we went camping. The bought was bought in 1964 and I still have it in 2003. The boat is thirty-nine years old and is still in very good condition.

During the 1970s Tom and I would put the boat on top of our Duster, load his mini-bike, the outboard motor, our tent, and all of our camping supplies and take off for Canada or Upper Michigan.

Woodward Stories
I thought Woodward Avenue at Detroit was a spectacular street when I first went there during the 50s. The median was probably thirty feet wide with four, and in some places, six lanes on each side. The street with crowned with American Elms that arched over the road. During the 50s it was called "the strip" of course.

It seemed every time I drove Woodward in those days I would see an accident, or a smashed car sitting by the road. But the time we moved to Detroit in the early 60s it had calmed down a little Eventually, I-75 was build and I could use the expressway to get to work at Highland Park, but I continued to use Woodward. The traffic on I-75 could often come to the standstill if an underpass flooded or there was an accident. Woodward, while slower, was never closed.

Woodward by McNichols [Six Mile Road] in Detroit was a hangout for prostitutes and they would try to flag you down as you drove by. Sometimes they would stand in the middle of the road and try to stop you. one day as I was passing by one she lifted her blouse and flashed me. Of course she had no bra on.

One Saturday I stopped at a Howard Johnson restaurant on Woodward in Highland Park to get a coffee. As I was leaving a nice looking black girl asked me if that was my car out at the curb. I said no, I owned that black pickup truck. Then she made me an offer for ten dollars. I was so flustered, I said, "I have to go or I'll be late for work." She did not look like that kind.

There was a black porter at work and he rode the bus to work every day. The bus dropped him off at Woodward and McNichols and he would have to walk to work from there. So sometimes I would wait where the bus let him off and drive him to work with me. Well, one day I got there early and as I waited a gal started walking up to my truck. I knew what she wanted, and when she got near the truck I opened the window and blurted out, "I'm waiting for a guy!" Then I decided to leave and as I was going I saw a policeman coming around the corner. I think they were trying to catch a "john." My buddy had to walk to work that day!

After I got to work I remembered the look on the gal's face and realized what she thought I'd meant. She did not know I was waiting for someone on a bus!

*****

Before we moved to Michigan my family would drive to see my grandparents. We would cross Ontario, Canada and take the Tunnel into Detroit. After the long hours and flat landscape of farms it was amazing to come out of the eerie, claustrophobic tunnel into a city of skyscrapers. I had been to Buffalo, but Detroit was bigger! It would be night by the time we arrived, and the streetlights and building lights and signs would fill the sky. I remember the tree lined avenue as we drove up Woodward to Royal Oak. 

I also remember the engineer Dad worked with, Emile Najm. He and his wife had my folks over for dinner and served their traditional Lebanese foods. Later in life Emile lost his vision but Chrysler arranged for him to continue working. Dad often helped Emile, sometimes driving him to Lansing, MI. 

The Animators: Enduring Friendship

When Thomas Wolfe used his home town of Ashville, NC in his first novel Look Homeward, Angel his portrayals of its residents were offended. You Can't Go Home Again, his posthumous novel, describes the less than warm homecoming he received afterward.

The artist's problem of how to use one's own life experiences in one's art remains a problem. Because we don't live or grow in a vacuum, telling our story necessitates talking about our relationships--and other people.

Where is the dividing line between an honest memoir and harming others? Do we have an obligation to tell our truth, unvarnished, or must we gloss over, alter, or lie to protect the innocent? Can we live with the consequences when we cause pain?

Kayla Rae Whitaker's novel The Animators is about two women who use their life stories in their animated films and bear the consequences.

The novel took me on a journey with unexpected twists and turns as I followed the friendship and working partnership of animators Sharon and Mel over ten years.

Sharon has escaped her Kentucky childhood when she wins a scholarship to an Upstate New York college,and  never looks back. She is internal, diffident, and controlled. Mel is a city girl, a party girl--talented, unvarnished, unpredictable.

They quickly bond as outsiders, becoming best friends and artistic partners. It is a relationship that both reinforces their darkness and supports them in their need.

Their animated movies flay open their souls, which Mel insists is therapeutic.Their first movie is Mel's story growing up with a mother who sold tricks or drugs to get by. Mel insists their second movie will be Sharon's story, beginning with a traumatic childhood incident, going on to her stream of bad relationships, to the stroke that nearly ended her life.

The first pages were so funny. Sharon's parents are resigned to life and their failing marriage. As she leaves for college her father thumps her on her back as if she were another guy; her mother hugs her too hard while whispering, "don't come back pregnant."

Sharon feels disassociated from the wealthy students at the private school until she meets Mel and feels a kinship to her forthright honesty, come what may. They love the same things and recognize in each other a talent for animation.

Sharon is the grounded one who keeps things in order, the clean-up lady when Mel crashes. Mel is the idea girl, the wild kid whose addictions to women, alcohol, and drugs wears Sharon down. But it is Sharon who suffers the health meltdown, and Mel reels herself in to become caretaker.

As the women deal with the burdens of their childhood, the struggles of the artistic life, and a series of failed relationships the reader is pulled into their world like a boat in a whirlpool. We don't always like Sharon and Mel, but we come to learn their burdens and respect them for their strengths.

The path to adulthood, which takes some thirty years, is hard. Sometimes we survive growing up. Sometimes we do not.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Animators
Kayla Rae Whitaker
Random House
Publication January 31, 2017
$27 hard cover
ISBN: 9780812989281