Misty's Musings

Genre: Literary

Author: Audrey Niffenegger

My Rating: 7/10

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted a book review. Around a month, to be precise. Though I was initially dedicated in my reading list, I fell off a bit while trudging through this story. I began to read pieces of Memoirs of a Geisha inbetween chapters, and then, in a sudden, charming twist, started dating someone darling and spent most of my time sending emails, grabbing coffee, or going to movies, instead of nestling up with cocoa and getting to it. There are reasons for that, of course. Her Fearful Symmetry is interesting enough, but, as I’ve read in other reviews, I wanted to like it more than I did.

The plot revolves around a pair of twins, their mother(s), a Victorian cemetary (get it? Symmetry, cemetary? Yeah? It took me awhile), and a ghost story. I gave this story a good rating (7/10), because I think Niffenegger’s prose is fantastic, her character development breathtaking, and her descriptions life-like and interesting. I even liked the story, for the most part, despite the fact that it rather lacked a plot until the last third of the novel. I was interested in the characters random happenings, enough that I managed to continue, chapter after chapter, simply wondering what they would do next.

But, in the end, I found the story somewhat lacking. That is to say, I was having a better time living my own life than reading about someone else’s, which is probably a good thing. Nonetheless, I intend to be more dedicated in my reading. Memoirs of a Geisha has been wonderful thus far, and if I’m not too busy falling in love, I’ll try to post a review soon.

The White Tiger
Genre: Fiction
Author: Aravind Adiga
My rating: 9/10

“One of the most powerful books I’ve read in decades. No hyperbole. This debut novel hit me like a kick to the head—the same effect Righard Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man had.” - USA Today

    The white tiger is a creature which comes around once in a generation, such a rarity that its very presence breaks the status quo and insists on enlightenment. Author Aravind Adiga, of India, is very much like that white tiger. His character, Balram, is a compelling, irreverent, satirical and amoral narrator who, in a period of seven days, dictates his life story to Wen Joabao, the Premier of China, who is coming to visit Bangalore, India, to meet entrepreneurs. Balram, as it is to be understood, is the entrepreneur of all entrepreneurs, and his tale encompasses his rise from a rickshaw-puller’s son living in a house where the water buffalo takes up more attention than he does, whose parents didn’t even have time to name him (they called him Munna, meaning “boy”), to a self-made man, owner of a great business (we are to understand) in Bangalore. To accomplish this task, to rise as miraculously as this man did, destined to serve as a “human spider” as a servant to the upper class, would take a certain amount of immorality. Murder being the key component to his success.
    Throughout the seven evenings (and one morning) of Balram’s tale, the reader becomes more and more engrossed. Because he is speaking directly to Wen Joabao, he narrates directly to “you,” and despite the fact that he added a whole lot of “sir’s” in there, it still felt like he was talking to me, his tone growing more and more irreverent as the nights went on. He begins by describing himself, using as a reference the wanted poster which circulated throughout all of India following the grisly murder he committed. The funny thing is that while we know who he killed from the very beginning, we don’t find out until the seventh night how he did it, where, and why. Even though the man he kills is a perfectly decent man, far superior to other masters Balram has known in the past, the driving point of the novel is the curiosity and excitement the reader feels waiting for the murder to be committed.
    Nothing better than pulp fiction, some might say, but The White Tiger is far from that. It’s an account of India which few Western people have considered, highly educational as well as humorous and the exact opposite of politically correct. (To be fair, I prefer that people be politically correct. It’s a way of ensuring a standard of respect for all human beings. However, the character of Balram is meant to be an poor, “half-baked” [but still brilliant] man, and his irreverence is telling and educational in and of itself). I really like the movie Slumdog Millionaire (I’ve only bought four movies in my life, which is probably a bit telling: Moulin Rouge, August Rush, Across the Universe, and Slumdog Millionaire), and it’s all I really know of India except for Bollywood stereotypes which are probably untrue, Bend it Like Beckham, and Bride and Prejudice. So, I wasn’t exactly sitting on a lot of knowledge about the country when I started reading the book. Having read it, I have a sense of knowing more about its politics, corruption, and greed, as well as the way the working class lives.
    Some things I learned: 1) There are servants in India, and in every hotel and apartment building there are servants’ quarters built in, sometimes underground. 2) The caste system is still used, though perhaps it is less important than it was pre-1947.  3) Many children are torn out of school, even in their elementary days, to work in teashops or etc., and so they get their educations, where applicable, from geometry textbook pages used to wrap food, or from eavesdropping on conversations. 4) A thousand people a day still die from tuberculosis in India, and if they are poor, the chances of them dying of T.B. are far greater. 5) A lot of American technology is outsourced through India.
    The list goes on. This book is a funny read, a black comedy as they call it, and it is constantly engaging. I have a tendency of reading books because I have to. As an English major, I read hundreds of books, most of which I didn’t want to. They were boring, dry, made me feel confused, offended, or worse, stupid. Books like Haruki Murakami’s The Wild Sheep Chase, or A Wind-Up Bird Chronicle seemed to epitomize my college experience. I had to read about someone’s wild and sickening dreams, all the while floating through a book I didn’t care for in the same way a person stuck inside a nightmare at night tries to wake up, knowing it’s not quite real, but feeling ill, anyway. In fact, I can hardly name a book that I wanted to read in college, with the possible exceptions of The Icarus Girl and Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories.
    In other words, I have been bored to death and made sick by many books (I won’t even mention how I despised Ellison’s Invisible Man or Morrison’s Beloved—I told a professor that once and he just said “so you don’t like books by black people?” Which is a bit unfair, I feel, because I liked Sula, which was written by the author of Beloved, very much). So, having disliked so many of the things I’ve been forced to read for a grade and a piece of paper to hang on my wall with which to prove I am smart, it was a relief to read a book which won the Man Booker Prize and didn’t simultaneously make me want to barf.
    I recommend everyone read it.

Love Medicine

by Louise Erdrich

Genre: Fiction/Native American

My rating: 10/10

            Powerful and relentless, Love Medicine is simultaneously a punch in the gut and a kiss on the face, as tender as its serious leanings allow, and as medicinal as the title would imply. Written by Louise Erdrich, who at the time was in her late twenties, this book shows the incredible prowess and potential of the author, who fulfilled that promise and continues to do so in a career that has now spanned three decades. 

              When I read Love Medicine for the first time, sometime in two-thousand ten, it was at the high recommendations of my professors and colleagues. I loved it to begin with, but was eventually a bit ruffled because there seemed to be a lot of sex in the book, which for whatever reason I didn’t appreciate. It made me uncomfortable, I guess. But something compelled me to keep reading it even after I had returned it to the library, so I would go to the library — kidding myself that I was just perusing — sit in the aisle where Love Medicine is located, and crack it open for an hour or two until the library closed. Finally, I relented and checked the book out, and was more than happy with its ending.

           Sherman Alexie fights with all the bitterness and hatred he can muster, attempting to find a healing that never really happens, but Louise Erdrich fights like an Indian hippie with so much love and tenderness that all the secret sorrows of her reservation-dwelling characters hit hard and fast and cut like knives.

            An effective route to accomplish her purpose.

           The story—if I can describe it—is about several intertwining families. The Kashpaws are reservation royalty. The Lamartines are a clan of boys with different fathers sprung from LuLu Lamartine, sensual tribal wanton and altogether likable character. The Lazarres are “no good,” and even Marie Lazarre, who marries Nector Kashpaw, disowns her family. The Morrisseys aren’t much better, and everyone is having sex with everyone, first cousins included. On a second reading, the sexual overtones seemed more like undertones, perfectly natural in the context of real peoples’ lives. Because they characters were real people, with their own vibrant and rich voices.

            If one thing weaves together all these seemingly-disjointed narratives, it is the death of June Morrissey, who married her cousin, Gordie, and had a son with him, King, and another son, Lipsha, by LuLu Lamartine’s son, Gerrie. Though we only meet June in the opening scene where she wanders off into a snowstorm, her life and various stories from it are told by many of the characters who narrate this ultimately redemptive tale of longing, loss, and secret pain.

            The thing I love about this book is its authenticity. The characters are often written in the first person (though sometimes in third-omniscient), which leads to a feeling of closeness. Since they are all interconnected, it doesn’t matter that the book spans from the 1930s to the early 80s, because each narrative is referenced later, and though they can stand alone, only all together do they create a whole. 

            My favorite voice is that of Lipsha Morrissey, June’s second son. His voice is so authentic it can be breathtaking to read his accounts. Overall, I recommend that everyone read this book when appropriate to do so for their age and maturity. It is an enlightening and creative account which will stand the test of time because it speaks hard-hitting truths with love as a shield to soften the blow.

Ten Little Indians

Author: Sherman Alexie

Genre: Fiction/Short Stories

My Rating: 7.0

“Alexie’s prose contains the reverberations and human noise of the best Raymond Carver stories. Although Alexie’s stories may taste like grief, they read like heaven.” - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Alexie reveals himself to be a more fearless writer than one might ever have imagined; the stories are bold, uncensored, raucous, and sexy, apt and true. The lives he portrays are so finely detailed, the tales so carefully woven, that even the most culturally sheltered reader is transported.” —San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

            Ten Little Indians is a provocative, meta piece which at its best is self-consciously transcendent and its worst is profane and disturbing. But Sherman Alexie is a man who has, throughout his career, sought to blend the sacred and profane, and he more than anyone would admit to the intentionally disturbing nature of his prose. I’m secretly and not-so-secretly in love with him, but it’s a love-hate relationship. I love him, and he hates everything. Even at his Ballard Library reading in Seattle last fall, when I managed to sneak in to the full, over-flowing reading with the rest of his salivating fandom (library rebellion! stick it to the librarian!),  Sherman Alexie made fun of everything and everyone, admitting his hatred, his bitterness, and the concealing nature of his humor. “I hate white people,” Sherman Alexie said, and everyone laughed. “I’m not joking,” he persisted, and his nearly all-white audience laughed all the louder.

            I am a self-declared fan who is more like a raving fanatic. I read his poetry like psalms and his prose as one of the four gospels. But even I see the fear, the vulnerability, the obsession which his stories reveal. A poet first, and a novelist and story-writer second, the nine stories in Ten Little Indians display Alexie’s intensely poetic nature. Alexie’s characters, on the greater whole, tend to be poets themselves, with other-worldly thinking patterns that apply to poets only, patterns which elude the rest of the world. I recognized them as a poet distinguishes sonnets, free verse, sestinas, and pantoums one from the other. The first such strange thinker is Corliss, “The Search Engine.” “What kind of Indian loses her mind over a book of poems? She was that kind of Indian, she was exactly that kind of Indian, and it was the only kind of Indian she knew how to be” (Alexie, 9).

            It isn’t just poetry that makes this book of stories devastate and fascinate with the same obsessive energy. It is the subject matter, the themes that run through each of the stories. Written in 2003, the story spends time discussing terrorism and its implications for Americans and Native Americans, respectively. The things Alexie says about the 9/11 victims are, to mose, offensive. An example: “Let’s say September eleventh means things nobody has thought of yet,” a character announces. “Let’s say twelve hundred men died that day. How many of them were cheating on their wives? A few hundred, probably. How many of them were beating their kids? One hundred more, right?” The speaker goes on to say things more profane than even this, which I won’t mention because I don’t want to plague the reader with it, but suffice to say, Alexie’s character, and possibly Alexie himself (through the extension of his character) outright says that the 9/11 victims weren’t innocent. By this logic, nobody is innocent; the worst is assumed of all.

            And yet, despite the gritty and foul nature which Sherman’s writing sometimes descends to, he has a way of being a poetic universalist, writing tales which are the ultimate in cultural relativism, yet which read in an inaccurate and somehow simultaneously accurate way. I enjoy it when Alexie talks about Jesus, for instance. I’ve watched Smoke Signals about a hundred times, and one of the lines in it is, “Arlene makes some Jesus frybread. Frybread walkin’ on water, frybread rising from the dead…” the character, Thomas Builds-the-Fire, laughs a high-pitched laugh. Ten Little Indians has similar references. One occurs when a woman, the victim of a terrorist bombing, begins to consider the deity.

            “Jesus is still here because Jesus was once here and parts of Jesus are still floating in the air. Jesus’ DNA is a part of the collective DNA. We’re all a part of Jesus; we’re all Jesus in part. If you breathe deep during the storm, you can sometimes taste Jesus in a good hard rain. Maybe pieces of Jesus have burned into skin and bone and cement and wood. Maybe you can see the face of Jesus in every bloodstain. Maybe you can see Jesus in my bloody face, she thought, maybe I’m Jesus himself. Maybe I’m a resurrection of the resurrected” (76).

            To a hard-nosed fundamentalist this can only be seen as a blasphemy, but a poet can sniff out good poetry like a coon dog hunting coons (clumsy simile courtesy of yours truly). Good poetry can be seen as a form of honoring the subject of poetry, and Jesus must inspire Sherman Alexie a lot to have him writing like that.

            The “we’re all a part of Jesus; we’re all Jesus in part,” theory is played out in another story, “What You Pawn, I Will Redeem.” A homeless Indian man in Seattle sees his grandmother’s regalia, stolen fifty years past, and recognizes it for the fact that his family always sews a hidden, yellow bead somewhere secret on the regalia. After a day of adventure and misadventure attempting to earn the money to buy the regalia from the pawn shop owner, the Indian man manages to win back his grandmother’s regalia.

            “I took my grandmother’s regalia and I walked outside. I knew that solitary yellow bead was a part of me. I knew I was that yellow bead in part. Outside, I wrapped myself in my grandmother’s regalia and breathed her in. I stepped off the sidewalk and into the intersection. Pedestrians stopped. Cars stopped. The city stopped. They all watched me dance with my grandmother. I was my grandmother, dancing” (194).

            It’s these weirdly transcendent moments that make me love Sherman Alexie, but it’s a love that is sprinkled with skepticism, with aloofness, with, at times, outright disdain. I grew up in an area where some people don’t like Sherman Alexie on sight. He’s a Spokane Indian (same as my grandma), and he writes about things that are close to home.

            But he is a good writer. And he’s a corrosive writer, and an angry writer, a bitter writer, and a hilarious writer. But I prefer his books of poetry to his books of prose any day of the week. At the reading I attended (read: crashed) in Seattle, Sherman said, “I’m a poet, but nobody cares about poets anymore. If I weren’t a novelist, none of you would be here.”

            That’s not true, at least not of me. I didn’t fall in love with Sherman Alexie over The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, nor over War Dances or Reservation Blues. And I especially did not fall in love with him over Indian Killer. It was One Stick Song, a book of poetry so extravagant and beautiful and extravagantly beautiful and beautifully extravagant that won my heart. It was The Business of Fancydancing, his first collection of poems, published at the tender age of twenty-six, that showed me the truth of who he is—who he can be. I love Sherman Alexie, but it is an unsatisfying love, at the end. It is unsustainable because as soon as I am inspired by one paragraph, the next paragraph negates it.

            I recommend Ten Little Indians only to mature readers, and there is one story in it that I don’t recommend at all because of its pornographic nature (The Search Engine). I think that Ten Little Indians is a win-lose, with inaccurate-but-poetic depictions of Jesus and cruel words spoken of 9/11 victims, and with sex used as a form of heart-breaking violence not only against a person’s body, but against her very soul. There is much to be said about this book, and there is much to be said about Sherman Alexie, a writer of writers, a champion of the printed word, and a lone Indian man who seems to think that the weight and fate of all stereotypes, all genocidal acts, and all racist thoughts and behaviors are his alone to carry.

American Indian Stories
Genre: Memoir, Story-Telling, Essays
Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin)
My rating: 8/10

    
    Zitkala-Sa, meaning Red Bird, is the name that Gertrude Bonnin (thus called by the “palefaces”) chose for herself. Though she was a Dakota-born Sioux Indian, she was taken away from her reservation and home to become a student at the White’s Institution and Earlham College in Indiana, and, surprisingly, she went on to become a teacher at Carlisle Indian School.     Zitkala-Sa began to publish her writings in around 1901-1902, and was soon a popular and novel writer for the audience of the time. As an Indian activist who sought change and full citizenship for her people, who were living as “wards of the country” at the time, Zitkala-Sa was considered a rebel against the school that had taught her the language with which she now spoke against them. For, at this time, to be an Indian in the world of the dominantly white culture which sought to assimilate her, Zitkala was seen as a backwards fool who revoked the training given to her which would allow her to be “civilized.”
    During Zitkala’s life, the Indian population in the United States went down to its all-time low, numbering in at 250,000. All around her, Zitkala saw her people and way of life being diminished by the colonizing culture that demanded they assimilate or die. But while Zitkala was being told to act and dress like a white girl, she was abandoning her shoes for moccasins and listening to the elders’ stories.
    Hence came American Indian Stories, a refreshing and unique perspective from a young Sioux who had outrageous success in the white world, yet chose to advocate for Indian rights rather than assimilate—though eventually she left the reservation with her husband and lived in more populous cities.
    American Indian Stories is enjoyable to read not only for the fact that it is authentic literature from Zitkala’s time period, but because she has a fresh and original voice. She was one of the first Native people to write “using English, the dominant language, in conjunction with Dakota oral tradition to create a new Indian rhetoric” (21).
    The book is split into chapters within-topic chapters, and told, for the most part, chronologically. The memoir aspect of the book begins with “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” goes on to “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” and culminates in “An Indian Teacher Among Indians.” These stories are all remarkable in their own way. I particularly enjoyed Zitkala-Sa’s treatment of her school days. In a sub-chapter entitled “The Cutting of my Long Hair,” Zitkala speaks of her first day at the school. At that point, she had not learned English, and had come straight from her reservation to the school.
    “The first day in the land of apples was a bitter-cold one; for the snow still covered the ground, and the trees were bare. A large bell rang for breakfast, its loud metallic voice crashing through the bellfry and into our sensitive ears. The annoying clatter of shoes on bare floors gave us no peace. The constant clash of harsh noises, with an under-current of many voices murmuring an unknown tongue, made a bedlam within which I was securely tied.” (52)
    Eventually, “Gertrude” became highly successful as a student and an orator, as well as an inspiring musician. Because of this, in her college days she spoke across the country. When an illness caused her to quit her studies, she applied to teach at the Carlisle Indian School, seeking to do good for her own people. She even describes the experience of meeting Captain Richard H. Pratt, the infamous mastermind behind the Residential schools who modeled them after a prison, and is known for his 1877 quote, “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
    This man’s attempt to save the Native by assimilating him perhaps did more destruction to Native peoples than when the plains buffalo were slain, than when the massacre at Wounded Knee occurred, than the Trail of Tears. And Zitkala met him.
    “I heard a heavy tread stop at my door. Opening it, I met an imposing figure of a stately gray-hared man. With a light straw in one hand, and the right hand extended in greeting, he smiled kindly upon me. For some reason I was awed by his wondrous height and his strong square shoulders, which I felt were a finger’s length above my head.
    I was always slight, and my serious illness in the early spring had made me look rather frail and languid. His quick eye measured my height and breadth. Then he looked into my face. I imagined that a visible shadow flitted across his countenance as he let my hand fall. I knew he was no other than my employer.
    ‘Aha! So you are the little Indian girl who created the excitement among the college orators!’ he said, more to himself than to me. I thought I heard a subtle note of disappointment in his voice.” (83)
    American Indian Stories involve more than autobiography, though. There are fictional works with evocative language and innovative story-telling which leave the reader breathless. One such tale included in the anthology is “A Warrior’s Daughter.” This appealed strongly to my feminist side. The main character of the story, Tusee, is a great chieftain’s daughter. But her father is proud, and refuses her suitor and the love of her life, insisting that he first bring the scalp of an enemy. Tusee knows that her lover is not strong enough, and when a war party returns with three missing—two dead, and one taken captive, she prays, “Great Spirit, speed me to my lover’s rescue! Give me swift cunning for a weapon this night! All-powerful Spirit, grant me my warrior-father’s heart, strong to slay a foe and mighty to save a friend!” (146) Indeed, she finds her lover tied in tight-binding rawhide being gloated over by his captor, a young brave. Luring the brave out into the night with her ecstatic beauty, she cuts him open with her long knife, and the enemy falls at her feet.
    As if this weren’t enough to question all gender roles. Tusee is the one to save her suitor by entering the enemy camp in the disguise of an elderly woman. And when she frees him from his binds, and he collapses, weary at her feet, she only smiles. “The sight of his weakness makes her strong. A mighty power thrills her body. Stooping beneath his outstretched arms grasping at the air for support, Tusee lifts him upon her broad shoulders. With half-running, triumphant steps she carries him away into the open night.” (153)
    Gotta love it. Zitkala-Sa’s stories challenge and intrigue. They offer new insight into old problems, make fresh spaces for creativity to foster, and entice the mind with her wit and candor. I recommend American Indian Stories to anyone who has a vested interest in the topic. They are written in such a way that they can be enjoyed by children and adults alike. My dad read aloud from them to my younger siblings, yet even as a studious English major I still find that I have much to learn from Zitkala-Sa’s storytelling, but most of all, from her brave, warrior life.

WorkCited: American Indian Stories by Zitkala-Sa

God Is Not a Christian, and Other Provocations

A Collection of Sermons, Speeches, Newspaper Clippings, and Writings

Desmond Tutu

My rating: 9.5/10

“For decades Desmond Tutu has been a moral titan—a voice of principle, an unrelenting champion of justice, and a dedicated peacemaker. He is an outspoken voice for freedom and justice in countries across the globe.” —President Barack Obama

“His unofficial legacy will be his life and the story of his this tiny pastor with a huge laugh from South Africa became our global guardian.” —Time Magazine

“His efforts have bridged the gulf between white and black, between oppressor and victim, and helped heal a nation in the spirit of atonement and forgiveness. I would like him to know that I, and a whole generation of Africans, stand tall and see farther because we stand on his shoulders.” Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations

            The words and ideas of Desmond Mpilo Tutu, laureate of the Nobel Peace prize and former Archbishop of the Anglican Church, are those which everyone should be familiar with. An “unrelenting champion of justice,” as Barack Obama said in an official White House statement on the occasion of Tutu’s retirement from public life, Desmond Tutu was prolific in his work to free South Africa of apartheid.

            Before my freshman year of college, I had never heard of apartheid, much less the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for which I began to admire the pastor and advocate. Apartheid was, in South Africa, “a policy and system of segregation and discrimination on grounds of race.” It was, according to the New Oxford Dictionary, “adopted by the successful Afrikaner National Party as a slogan in the 1948 election. Apartheid extended and institutionalized existing racial segregation. Despite rioting and terrorism at home and isolation abroad from the 1960s onward, the white regime maintained the apartheid system with only minor relaxation until February 1991.”

            In 1994, President Nelson Mandela appointed Tutu the chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This would grant amnesty to those who had committed what the government defined as “gross violations of human rights”  in the name of apartheid if they had acted with a political motive. This amnesty would be granted only to those who told the entire truth of what they had done. In this way, the perpetrator and victim could experience reconciliation through the act of truth-telling.

            Though Desmond Tutu has retired from public office, this, and many other compilations of his public speeches, sermons, and writings have been published and widely distributed so that all of us can learn the full extent of Tutu’s life’s work, and benefit from exposure to his groundbreaking ideas.

            The book, God is Not a Christian, is split into four parts. One: Advocate of Tolerance and Respect; Two: International Campaigner for Justice; Three: Voice of South Africa’s Voiceless, and four, South Africa’s Conscience.

            One of the chapters which I enjoyed the most were “Our Glorious Diversity,” which spoke on the celebration of differences between God’s creation. “We inhabit a universe that is characterized by diversity,” he spoke in a speech to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

“There is not just one planet or one star; there are galaxies of all different sorts, a plethora of animal species, different kinds of plants, and different races and ethnic groups. God shows us, even with a human body, that it is made up of different organs performing different functions and that it is precisely that diversity that makes it an organism If it were only one organ, it would not be a human body. We are constantly being made aware of the glorious diversity that is written into the structure of the universe we inhabit.” (49)

Tutu goes onto explain that diversity is something that should be celebrated, not diminished, and that ethnocentrism is the root of great evil and bigotry.

            Another chapter that I found particularly insightful was “No Future Without Forgiveness,” in which Tutu advocates for a level of forgiveness and grace which some would think impossible. When Tutu visited the Holocaust museum of Yad Vashem, he wrote in the guestbook an appeal for God to “forgive all people who oppress others.” Some were enraged that he would write a comment about God forgiving the Nazis in a Holocaust museum. He explained that this came from the paradigm that Jesus himself provided.

“As he [Jesus] was being crucified, he said, ‘Father, forgive them.’ It wasn’t as if he was talking about something that might happen. He was actually experiencing one of the most excruciating ways of being killed, and yet he had the capacity to live out a prayer that he taught Christians, that we can expect to be forgiven only insofar as we are ready to forgive.”

Tutu goes on to explain that he was speaking from a perspective of one who had experienced extreme suffering, yet he still advocated for forgiveness. “The fact that I have black skin already identifies me and singles me out for racist suffering. If black people were to say ‘We cannot, we will not forgive white people forever,’ where would we be in South Africa?” (27)

            I was particularly moved by this as a Native American woman who has come from a background of genocide, both cultural and physical, being perpetrated against my people. Yet Tutu and other radicals for forgiveness such as Native singer Bill Miller not only advocate for, but model extraordinary forgiveness.

            I would say that the topic which most moved me, among many moving chapters, was Tutu’s advocacy for our LGBTQ brothers and sisters in “All, All Are God’s Children.” He brilliantly and eloquently elucidates the way in which the struggling of the LGBTQ community for their rights is no different than the black people of South Africa struggling for freedom, or the struggle of women to be given equality and a voice.

“The Jesus I worship is not likely to collaborate with those who vilify and persecute an already oppressed minority. I myself could not have opposed the injustice of penalizing people for something about which they could do nothing—their race—and then have kept quiet as women were being penalized for something they could do nothing about—their gender; hence my support for the          ordination of women to the priesthood and the episcopate.

Equally, I cannot keep quiet while people are being penalized for something about which they can do nothing—their sexuality. To discriminate against our sisters and brothers who are lesbian or gay on grounds of their sexual orientation for me is as totally unacceptable and unjust as apartheid ever was.” (55)

Tutu goes on to make a compassionate, moral, and theological argument for the inclusion of the LGBTQ community in our churches and societies.

“Jesus did not say, ‘I, if I be lifted up, I will draw some.’ Jesus said, ‘I, if I be lifted up from the earth, I will draw all, all, all, all, all.’ (John 12:32, KJV)—black, white, yellow, rich, poor, clever, not so clever, beautiful, not so beautiful. It is one of the most radical things. All, all, all belong: gay, lesbian, so-called straight. All, all are meant to be held in this incredible embrace that will not let us go. All.” (56)

            There are many other quotable quotes from God is Not a Christian, and Other Provocations. The entire book is a treatise on international justice. Tutu is, from the beginning, seemingly fearless. He was, in a time of South Africa’s greatest struggle for freedom, a voice that rang out clear and true. Even as his compatriots who spoke out against apartheid were arrested and executed for treason, Tutu did not relent to a corrupt and racist government. He continued to seek non-violence and international tolerance in many countries for many years, using this approach to facilitate reconciliation all around the globe. The collection of his sermons, speeches, newspaper clippings, and other writings in God is Not a Christian are completely timeless. I enjoyed reading this book, and will continue to read Tutu’s work, as I found it to be an edifying and peaceful experience.

Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain

Memoir

Portia de Rossi

My rating: 4.5/10

“Possibly the best book on the subject ever written. De Rossi is the real deal, a fine writer with a sharp mind and substance. This rich, layered book of remarkable courage, power, and significance will serve as life-changing inspiration for many.” Augusten Burroughs

“Breathtakingly honest, brutal, and beautiful.” Jonathan Safran Foer

            I first saw Portia de Rossi’s book in Barnes N’ Noble a few years ago and brushed it off as being fluff without even looking at the back cover. This was an unfair and cynical treatment of the actress’s work, and after a great deal of time hearing about the book, reading quotations from online bloggers, and genuinely admiring Portia as an actress and an activist, I finally decided to order the book from the library. There were several copies available at different branches, indicating to me the popularity of her work. I enjoy memoirs, am a raving fan of Ellen DeGeneres, and generally knew what the content matter of the book would be: de Rossi’s struggle with anorexia and bulimia as a popular Hollywood actress. I hoped that the book would discourse on the topic of Portia and Ellen’s 2008 marriage, and had been under the impression that Portia and Ellen’s romance had been a hugely contributing factor in Portia’s recovery.

            I was rather disappointed.

            The story starts out strong. A prologue hideously details every compulsive element of Portia’s life while she is trapped inside the highly regulated and obsessive worlds of anorexia and bulimia. From her extremely low caloric intake to her compulsive over-exercising, Portia takes us along with her through the dark journey of her eating disorder. Her writing is compelling, and the strength of her narrative voice, candor, and knack for story-telling breezed this reader through the first two-thirds of the book—until I started to get increasingly more annoyed.

             She talks about her early life, her childhood, her hatred of the word “normal,” and her desire and drive to be special. Hence how Amanda Rogers changed her name to Portia de Rossi, became a model from a young age, and eventually dropped out of law school to pursue her acting career, landing roles on such auspicious comedies as Ally McBeal and Arrested Development.

             But behind the scenes (literally), Portia was in the fight of her life—for her life—and to become thin. She was warring with herself, needing perfect control of everything that went into her body. Her ideology, of the time, is explained on page 224.

            “‘Portia. You ate potatoes. Just some potatoes. They’re not going to make you fat, okay? What’s the big deal?’”

“They will make me fat because it’s not just some potatoes that I just ate, it’s the      potatoes I know I’m going to eat in the future now that I’ve allowed myself to eat those. That by eating those potatoes I could get back on the same old yo-yo dieting pattern and suffer in the way that I’d suffered from age twelve to twenty-five. Eating those potatoes could cost me my career, money, and my ability to make money. Eating those potatoes will make me poor. So eating those potatoes will make me fat. Because without any money or a career, I will definitely end up fat.”

            This phrase elucidates the roundabout, circling, painful, and obsessive cycles of Portia’s mind at the time of her disorder. It also shows the rather maddening type of prose-style the book is written in. It’s not necessarily very “good” writing, after awhile. Though at first, Portia’s voice comes across as being personal, after awhile, you wonder why her editor didn’t edit the word “just” from appearing twice in once sentence, and so on, and so forth.

            While I appreciated Portia’s candor in her memoir, and I genuinely admired the fact that she traced back and attributed her eating disorder to the fact that she is gay and was unable to be honest with the media and most of her family members, this could not make up for the three-hundred and six pages of repetition and whininess. Because Portia was so honest about the nature of her struggle, she did not try to make herself seem less needy, selfish, and whiny than she actually was. On top of this, she repeated told the reader exactly what her weight was at different times, and remarked blatantly that she was “fat” at 130 pounds. She also calls other people fat and comments on their appearances. As this is a real memoir, and real names are used, I found this disrespectful. I also considered the fact that her book is probably read by girls who have eating disorders, and ridiculing 130 as being fat, and 150 as heavy, etc., she is putting it in the minds of her readership that they are inadequate, which is counter-productive to her purpose.

            There was a genuine element of interest in her life story, and for a while I was quite intrigued, but I had to force myself to finish the book. I had hoped that Ellen would feature a main role, but, disappointingly, she is barely mentioned except briefly in the epilogue. Portia finishes the book by giving what she considers to be “good” weight loss advice: love yourself, eat what you want, and exercise in ways that you enjoy. “I rarely see an overweight person walking a dog, whereas I see many overweight people walking on treadmills in a gym” (301). I didn’t find her theory to hold up logically, but maybe it was just my reading.

            I wouldn’t recommend this book, mainly because it isn’t exactly a memoir of Portia’s life, it’s a memoir of her anorexia and bulimia, so it leaves out the elements I was most interested in. Perhaps another person’s reading would differ, but that is mine.