Bookwi.se

Summary: Tracing the story of “Freedom School” as one of the backbones of the Civil Rights movement.

When I first heard about Spell Freedom, I thought it was a history of the Highlander Folk School. The Highlander Folk School played an important part in establishing the early freedom schools and eventually moved their teacher training program (and main Freedom school staff person, Septima Clark) to the SCLC. As is made clear in the book, the Highlander Folk School played an important behind the scenes role in the Civil Rights Movement. By the early 1950s, when Septima Clark attended her first training program, Highlander had been around for nearly 30 years. It was consciously integrated from early on, but its work shifted from labor organizing to civil rights organizing in the late 1940s. Clark quickly started leading training sessions and soon after, was forced out of her teaching job in Charleston SC because she was a member of the NAACP and in leadership of the local chapter.

The most likely reason that someone may know about Highlander Folk School is because Rosa Park attended one of Clark’s early training session in the summer of 1954, just before she prompted Montgomery Bus Boycott. Clark and Parks became life long friends. And it was not long after that Septima Clark first met Ella Baker. At the time Ella Baker was an organizer for the SCLC and their voting right program was floundering. The Nashville sit-in movement came to Highlander for training and Ella Baker used Highlander regularly as SNCC was developed. But about this time, the state of Tennessee was able to confiscate the property and shut down the Highlander Folk School, forcing it to move and reincorporate.

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Summary: Faithful graphic novel adaptation of this classic fantasy novel.

My kids are very big graphic novel fans. I read a handful of graphic novels a year, but I am not a consosouir of graphic novels. (Go check out GoodOkBad as a review site that really does know graphic novels.)

A graphic novel adaptation is hard. Seth at GoodOkBad wrote about the graphic novel adaptation of The Road. It was one that I started but never finished because I thought that it seemed to be missing some of the point of the book.

For The Wizard of Earthsea, I think Fred Fordham did a good job with the adaptation. Even with a relatively short novel like this, a graphic novel just can’t do everything that can be communicated in print. I liked the art and as noted in the introduction by LeGuin’s son, her intention of making the main character dark skinned (in 1968) and the only light skinned characters were villains. But in several of the movie/video adaptations that was stripped from the story.

Wizard of Earthsea is a classic coming of age novel. Ged, the main character grows up without much adult supervision after his mother dies when he is young. His father most ignores him or uses him for labor. But after he overhears his aunt use a magic spell and then does it on his own (to bad effect) she takes him under her wing and starts to teach him what little she knows of magic.

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Summary: An introduction to Howard Thurman focusing on the role of radical inclusivity in his work.

This is the fourth book by or about Thurman I have read this year. I am pretty familiar with Thurman at this point, but I find that many of the book written about him are mostly introductory, but often do not overlap significantly. This is an incredible reality for Thurman because his work was often so diverse, that many people can write introductions to his work from various perspectives and yet not overlap with much of their focus.

Howard Thurman was a theological and philosophical forerunner of the civil rights movement and a spiritual director and mentor to its leadership. But he was also an expert in mysticism, interfaith cooperation and learning, the role of non-violence, personal spiritual disciples and other areas. As has often been reported, he was advised by an early white mentor to avoid the academic study of racial issues because it would cause people to pigeonhole him into only being “a race man.” Thurman both understood why that advice was given and resented the advice (and somewhat followed it.)

Thurman’s work simply was influenced by his social location and experience. That is not a controversial statement, but there is no way that he couldn’t have been influenced by being primarily raised by a grandmother who had been enslaved or by having to be a boarding student for high school because there were no local high schools that admitted black students. There is no way that he couldn’t have been influenced by the ways that he broke color barriers throughout his life. As Thurman pointed out in his memoir, the White mentor thought that it was possible for Thurman to not center race in his work, but didn’t really understand how race had been centered in the experience of the whole United States.

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Summary: Think “Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple” but with even less likable characters and a lot more masturbation.

I don’t tend to write about books I didn’t finish, but I am going to here. I don’t know why I had this on my list. I am sure I saw someone I know recommend it. But I don’t remember where the recommendation came from. It was at the library and I wanted another fiction book. From the early book I thought it was going to be  similar to Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple, and it was, but I thought it might be better, I was wrong.

I am somewhat surprised how many elements were similar between the two books. Both women were facing a midlife crisis. Both had kids with very significant medical issues that contributed to their exhaustion. Both women had not quite lived up to their early promise. And they both run away.

But while Bernadette runs away to experience the world and find herself. But the (unnamed) narrator of this book starts a solo cross country road trips and ends up spending weeks hiding in a hotel room a couple hours from home.

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Summary: After winning nearly unimaginable wealth and power at the end of the last book, things do not really go that well, that is until there is another quest. 

I really enjoyed Ready Player One. I liked all the references to cultural history. I enjoyed the story, the light romance, the YA feel. But I just never got around to reading this second book. I bought a kindle version years ago. I finally started it this summer when the audiobook was buy one get one free with a book I wanted and nothing else to get free that I wanted other than this. I went in with very low expectations. Just looking at the star ratings of my Goodreads friends made me keep those expectations low. A few people liked it, but most were in the 1 to 3 range.

I am not going to give away many spoilers, but I do think this had more depth than I expected. The set up to the second book is long and I think while I understand that complaint, it was a necessary part of the story. Wade at the end of the first book is barely out of his teens, but he just won a company that is worth billions. He was a likable kid when he had nothing. But when he had fame, power and resources, he quickly becomes unlikable, not just to the reader, but to everyone around him. I understand why people didn’t like that choice, but I think it does make sense to the story arc.

When Wade is at his best, he is on a quest. He works with his friends, and they can accomplish the impossible together. But as an individual trying to make his way in the world, he is awful. He doesn’t have the skills to run a trillion dollar company. He doesn’t have the ethical development to understand the implications of new technology. He doesn’t have the emotional and relational development to be attractive to Samantha (the love interest in the first book.) I appreciate that this book dropped some of the YA feel. The protagonist isn’t a late teen any longer and the hedonistic approach to life that is part of the story line requires at least touching on the world of hedonism.

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Summary: An adopted boy discovers not only is some of his family still alive, but he isn’t even human. 

I read this several years ago and then again as a read-aloud with my son. My son is a good reader, but he also tends to only read graphic novels. I am not opposed to graphic novels, but I do want to get him into a wider range of books. He tends to fully invest in a book and finish it quickly. And frequently because he can read a graphic novel so quickly, he will reread it two or three times before we return it to the library. I am also heavily invested in reading on my kindle, and while he has occasionally read on my kindle, he prefers paper. But more than anything, I just love reading out loud. I tend to read when he is sketching or folding clothes or doing some other task that a keeps him present but not intellectually engaged.

Orion is a twelve year old boy at the start of the book. He was adopted by an older Korean woman whom he calls Halmoni (Korean for grandmother). Orion is smart and great at fixing things. He and his best friend compete in a robotics competition and he fixes people’s bicycles. But he also constantly needs his inhaler and is clumsy. Walking home one night in suburban Atlanta, someone tries to kill him, and someone else shows up to protect him. And that starts a whole series of events leading Orion to be brought back to his home planet to live an assumed identity. He discovers that there is an empire with three small planets who have powers that people on Earth would consider magic, but are connected to stardust in the nebula near the planets.

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Summary: The story of two couples, a shared pastorate and their wives in mid 20th century NYC.

There are not many books that I stay up too late on multiple nights in a row to finish, but The Dearly Beloved is one of them. It has the feel of Gilead or the Starbridge series by Susan Howatch but it did not quite rise to that level. This is a book that I devoured in audio and I will come back and read again in print. But I wanted more.

The Dearly Beloved opens with the death of one of the four, but we don’t know until the epilogue when that death occurs. After the brief initial opening, we go back and the four characters are developed from their origin stories until about the midpoint of the book where the two men are jointly called to be co-pastors in the mid 1960s New York City. I could not help but think of Eugene Peterson as I read about their early years as pastors. Eugene Peterson was also Presbyterian and also was a young pastor in NYC as he worked on his PhD and tried to decide if he was going to be an academic or a pastor. Both of these pastors in the story had their PhDs, and one of the wives also had a PhD in Literature and in the opening years of their ministry she was a professor at The New School. Eugene Peterson planted his suburban Maryland church in 1962, right about the same time as these two were coming to their 100 year old church that had seen better days.

One of my favorite parts of the book was Jane, the church administrator/secretary who trained the two to be pastors together. She understood the church and the community and what it needed. She loved the church and loved the two pastors. She had her own weaknesses and biases, but she helped them find their way and kept them together as they knitted together “a call.”

The book is structured in three parts, the early years of the characters and how each of them met and married. The second part is the early years of ministry and the ways that their history and faith and personality came together (or didn’t). The third part is the crisis and resolution. The crisis and resolution makes sense internally, but I also felt like it was too simple for the first two parts, it ended the book too early. I don’t like complaining about what is not in a book, but the build up of character and background felt like it was too big for the main crisis and resolution to be only a four year period of the late 1960s. I think there needed to be at least two additional parts that followed the couples into middle age. It is not that people do not have significant life struggle in their 30s, but when there is significant life struggle, the resolution of their 30s or early 40s will not maintain equilibrium into their 50s and 60s or beyond.

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