Taste: My Life Through Food – Stanley Tucci
Coincidentally my hold on this came in just as his latest travel/food show premiered. It is equal parts autobiography and food diary of his entire life. He writes exactly as he speaks on his travel shows, which is either a good, comforting thing or annoying based on what you think of those shows. I read a review of his new show that complained about how into himself he is. If you share that view, you might want to skip this one.
James – Percival Everett
An amazing book. It is framed as a re-telling of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, but told from the perspective of Jim, the escaped slave that accompanied Huck on his travels. If you know Everett and have read any of his other books, you know this won’t be neither an easy tale, but will be told with tremendous courage and inventiveness.
We quickly learn that most slaves speak and behave much differently when amongst each other in private. Where they act simple and uneducated around whites, when isolated together they speak better English than the white people who subjugate them. They teach their young ones how to behave in public, including lessons in “slave speak” – “Yas massa,” etc – and how to never reveal to white folks their true level of intelligence. If something is missing in the house, you lead them to it while making them think they found it on their own. You never, ever leave the impression that you were responsible for solving these life’s little mysteries.
Jim and Huck fall in together and flee Hannibal, MO down the Mississippi River. They have adventures. They defy death multiple times. But, again, the story is told completely from Jim’s perspective. His mission is to escape capture and find a way to return to Hannibal to buy his wife and daughter’s freedom. Thus he is constantly on the lookout for whites up and down the river who are searching for him. When they enter a town, he must act like he is Huck’s responsibility. When he falls in with other, sympathetic whites, he is forced to behave as if he were their slave. And so on.
The book is split into three sections. The third is pretty intense, and has a monumental surprise reveal in its opening pages. There are a couple clues leading to this moment, but I still had to re-read the passage several times to make sure I understood it correctly. Despite understanding that this book took place in 1861, it was still disturbing and upsetting to get this view of the US during the time when slavery was still legal and how even “kind” whites often treated Blacks like animals rather than humans. We know that the real lives of slaves were far different than what was presented in either contemporary or historical accounts. I like that Everett gives his characters some control over their lives and makes them clearly more enlightened than the people who own them. They don’t just crave freedom. They can make passionate, educated arguments against slavery far more informed than the arguments in favor of slavery.
I know I’ve read Huckleberry Finn as an adult, probably 20–25 years ago, so I just read a quick synopsis of it to remind myself of the gist. I wish I had re-read the entire book to see how Everett’s story lined up with and diverged from Twain’s. Twain was always subtly subversive, so I think he would appreciate what Everett did with the bones of his original.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This – Omar El Akkad
This was a difficult book, for many reasons. El Akkad is an Egyptian-born journalist and author who currently lives in the US and has US citizenship. In this he writes mostly about the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how, in his view, the coverage of it in the west has been extremely one-sided and how the defense of the Israeli viewpoint has spilled over to many other aspects of our society. You watch the news, you know what he’s talking about.
I’m not going to get into all the details of that conflict. I feel like my views mirror what most people’s are: that the Israelis had an absolute and unquestioned right to defend themselves against the terrorists that attacked on October 7, 2023, but that response has gone well beyond what was proportionate and appropriate and is more focused on wiping out the Palestinian state than securing Israel’s borders.
El Akkad writes about not just the horrors of the war itself, but how it has spilled over to affect politics and society in the western world. Even if you do not have strong feelings about what is going on in Palestine, if you support democracy and free speech, you have to be upset at how those concepts have been set aside within the debate over the war.
More interestingly to me is how El Akkad uses the Israel-Palestine situation as a jumping off point to discuss the many flawed ways we Americans view ourselves, the inconsistencies in our national myths. For example, Americans love to side with the plucky underdog, and often view ourselves as exactly that, a remnant from our Revolutionary War days when we defeated the greatest world power of the era. Never mind that we have been, since World War II, not just the biggest power of the era but the most powerful nation in the history of humanity. Adhering to the idea that we are underdogs absolves us from acknowledging the realities of our place in the world, from taking responsibility for our actions. We are always fighting some greater evil, no matter that there is no power equal to ours.
The title also refers to how so many of us often prefer to stay silent or not take a stand in moments of crisis, but later suddenly find the courage to proclaim our opposition to policies that went awry.
This book made me think more about our country than the Israel-Palestine war. I would imagine because of that it will not appear in many school libraries, and likely be banned from most public libraries at some point. I’m shocked El Akkad hasn’t had his citizenship stripped and he been shipped back to one of the countries he lived in before becoming an American. God forbid we ever question either our national myths or policies. Especially when it a brown, Muslim, born halfway around the world leading the questioning.