South to America : A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by Imani Perry. - 2022 - 410 pages

 South to America : A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by Imani Perry. - 2022 - 410 pages 

National Book Award Winner for Non-Fiction -2022

 

New York Times Best Seller

"An meditation on the complexities of the American South—and thus of America—by an esteemed daughter of the South and one of the great intellectuals of our time. An inspiration.”

— Isabel Wilkerson, New York Times bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

My ancestors first arrived in the American South long before anyone thought to use use that expression to refer to the region, my estimate is maybe 1650. Some how some of my maternal ancestors moved to then Florida about 1790, settling near what is now Orlando. Family records document that they founded the first library in central Florida. Like everyone else they were farmers. I would acknowledge some ownded slaves.. They fought for the Confederates in the Civil War. In junior high school, maybe 1960, students sang "Dixie Land", said the Lord's Prayer, all things unthinkable now.

I learned to love the staples of southern cuisine. I was also brought up to view racism as an aborent shameful way of thought. I was among the last of students in Florida to attend legally segregated schools in 1965 when I graduated from high school.

In her marvelous book Perry talks about how white American students were taught to view the "War Between the States" as a "lost cause". Little mention was ever made in the classes I took the early 1960s about slavery. Students never learned that iconic American presidents like Washington and Jefferson owned slaves.

Try to think back to what you might have learned in college or high school about how enslaved persons were to be counted. Here is the truth:

"The enslaved, it explains, were property and people both. The logic that followed was insincere: as people they must have some form of representation. But of course the three-fifths clause was not representation of the enslaved at all. This is what it doesn’t say: we believe in amplifying the representation of those who have dominion over other souls, and this is why those individuals must count for more in our government. It is not the case, as some argue, that the clause was a term of art meaning that Black people people counted for three-fifths of a person. They did not count at all. Rather slaveholders were made larger people by virtue of holding others as slaves. Sven Beckert described the impact as follows: “Southern slaveholders had enshrined the basis of their power into the Constitution with its three-fifths clause. A whole series of slaveholding presidents, Supreme Court judges, and strong representation in both houses of Congress guaranteed seemingly never ending political support for the institution of slavery.” "

Perry is an African American woman, descended 

from enslaved peoples, who grew up in Alabama, went to college initially in an historically Black college. Part of this marvelous book is a memoir of her return to the south, she grew up partially in Birmingham, Alabama, and the emotions and thoughts this journey through out the South invoked in her. It is also a very valuable source of historical insight.

Perry deals with the divide in American society. It is no coincidence that almost all the states of the South, but for Georgia, went for trump. The central political theme of Going South is that the blame for the abominations exemplified by the support by around half of White Americsns is claimed to belong totally on the American South is a false and pernicious idea used as an excuse 

Perry devotes a lot of space to talking about Queer culture, particularly Drag personalities (and the Governor of Florida seems obsessed with Drag Shows). I knew nothing of the history Perry reveals:

"Here is another contradiction. The South is home to some of the richest queer culture in the world, and some of the deepest intolerance to any order other than patriarchy. I suppose that is why the Lady Chablis was wont to say, “Two tears in a bucket, motherfuck it.” Every cruelty is also an acknowledgment that the thing or people reviled are there, and ain’t going nowhere. I think this was Flannery O’Connor’s point when she said, “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.” Lest that sound too glib or cruel, she also said, “I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.”

As Perry documents through the published letters of Flannery O'Connor, she made use of racist expressions. I was saddened by this.

Perry talks about now revered African American writers like James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison (both Gay and both moved to Paris once they could) and Toni Morrison dealt with their Southern heritage. She goes in depth into Zora Neale Hurston’s treatment of the experiences of African Americans in central Florida. 

"The pride Hurston took in being from Eatonville was due to how she saw it. It provided a much different origin story than Jacksonville could give. Eatonville was the first incorporated Black town in the United States. It was established in 1887 by freedpeople who, through collective purchases, established and advertised their town as a place of possibility for African Americans. They built wood-frame houses, schools, and a municipal government. It provided a refuge from the violence just outside their borders. Orange County, in which it sits, was once the center of racial violence in the South. Florida had the highest per capita rate of lynching in the South, and Orange County had the highest number of lynchings in the state between 1877 and 1950. You can understand why Eatonville was precious to its daughter. Hurston set her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in Eatonville. The town still exists. It is small and overwhelmingly Black to this day, but isn’t defined by a story of racial violence in the way many of the other incorporated Black towns during Jim Crow were."

I have quoted more than I normally do from a book. I want to share the beautiful prose of Perry with my readers.

From The National Book Foundation 

"Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Perry is the New York Times bestselling author of South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. She is also the author of Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, winner of the 2019 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography; Breathe: A Letter to My Sons; Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation; and May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem. Perry, a native of Birmingham, Alabama, who grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Chicago, lives outside Philadelphia with her two"

I offer my thanks to Imani Perry for this wonderful book.

Mel Ulm

Birdgirl: Looking to the Sky for a Better Future by Mya-Rose Craig - A Memoir- forthcoming March 28,2023

 Birdgirl: Looking to the Sky for a Better Future by Mya-Rose Craig - A Memoir- forthcoming March 28,2023

"Birdwatching has never felt like a hobby, or a pastime I can pick up and put down, but a thread running through the pattern of my life, so tightly woven in that there’s no way of pulling it free and leaving the rest of my life intact.”

Birdgirl is a very powerful deeply moving memoir by a twenty year old woman.The focus is on how a love of birdwatching, called "twitching" in England, lead her to a deep interest in conservation and climate issues. Interwoven with this is her story of growing up dealing with her mother's serious mental health problems, she was bipolar. Her mother was from Bangladesh and her father English which impacted her life in a society with biases against minorities.

Mya-Rose Craig began birdwatching at eight, starting with her father, she became obsessed with birds, seeing them, listing her sightings on birding website and becoming at 17 to be the youngest person to have seen over 5000 species of birds, half of the estimated 10,000 in the world. Her mother, a solicitor, had extreme mood swings. Growing up Mya-Rose did not understand the causes of this but she came to look for down turns which might keep her mother feeling like doing nothing all day to be as inexplicably to her up moods when her mother would work 12 hours a day, then come home and plan bird watching trips.

Each chapter begins with a description of a bird she hopes to see. I learned a lot about birds, their environments, birding lodges (for fun I followed a few lodges on Facebook)

Her family had the resources to go on lengthy birdwatching trips all over the world. They spent three months touring twitching hot spots in South America. Her mother planned the trips and Mya-Rose noticed her mother, who was also an obsessive twitcher, seemed better on trips. I learned birdwatching was a competitive pursuit as well as a community building activity.

Mia-Rose began to get noticed by British media. At 13 she was giving speeches all over England, she became involved in environmental causes along with Greta Thunburg. She was trying hard to fit in as a young teenager with her age peers. We see the struggles to find help for her mother. The mother's issues emotionally strained the father. She begins a program to get more minorities involved in birdwatching.

I am very glad to close out this year on The Reading Life with such an interesting and inspiring memoir. If Mya-Rose Craig can pack so much in just 20 years I know she will be a powerful force for the good of the earth.

 "I am a 20-year-old prominent British-Bangladeshi ornithologist, environmentalist, diversity activist as well as an author, speaker and broadcaster. At age 11 I started the popular blog Birdgirl, and at age 17 I became the youngest person to see half of the birds in the world" from.https://www.birdgirluk.com/

For more about her amazing accomplishments I refer you to her website.

From Amazon 

"Mya-Rose Craig, also known as Birdgirl, is a 20-year-old British-Bangladeshi birder, environmentalist, and diversity activist. She campaigns for equal access to nature, to end the climate and biodiversity loss crises, issues which she believes are intrinsically linked, while promoting Global Climate Justice. She also fights for the rights of indigenous peoples, is an Ambassador for Survival International and has previously written a book in the UK amplifying their voices.

At age fourteen she founded Black2Nature, to engage teenagers of color with nature and at seventeen she became the youngest Briton to receive an honorary Doctorate, awarded by Bristol University for this pioneering work. Also at seventeen she became the youngest person to see half the world's bird species and shared a stage with Greta Thunberg, speaking to 40,000 protestors. In September 2020 she held the world's most northerly Youth Strike, traveling with Greenpeace, for whom she is an Oceans' Ambassador, to the melting pack ice of the high Arctic."

Mel Ulm

The Year of No Garbage;Recycling Lies, Plastic Problems and One Woman' Trashy Journey to Zero Waste by Eva Schaub- forthcoming January 2023

 

The Year of No Garbage:Recycling Lies, Plastic Problems and One Woman's Trashy Journey to No Waste by Eva Schaub- Forthcoming January 2023- 336 Pages

"When we say “garbage” what we’re really saying is climate change. What we really mean is discrimination. What we really mean is cancer. Garbage is at the root of so many things that are going wrong in the world today— from global warming and environmental racism to cancer: the number two killer of Americans— and it’s getting worse all the time." From a year of no Garbage by Eva Schaub

This is a delightful account of Eva Schaub's very determined attempt to go a year without 

Creating any garbage. Living in Vermont with her husband and her two daughters, one in high school the other in college, she, began to wonder about what eventually happens to the estimated 6000 plus pounds of stuff they put in the garbage bins in front of the house.in a year.   Having written a book about her experiences totally cutting sugar from their diet, A Year Without Sugar, she decides to embark on a year of serious recycling while eliminating as much waste as possible. To make it all the more challenging, soon after she starts, the Covid Pandemic begins.  

The memoir is a blend of her challenges and what she learned about the terrible impact the extreme pervasiveness plastics have on the environment and the deceptions employed to make well meaning people feel good when they drop things in a recycling bin at the grocery store when in fact doing this just perpetuates problems. Garbage is moved from affluent places, "liberal" places and dumped on the poor areas. No predominantly White Country accepts garbage from other countries, no first world country. The fees paid to dump garbage go into the pockets of leaders of poorer countries.  

The first challenge Schaub faced was getting her family on board. Her husband Steve liked the idea,her two daughters reaction was "whatever,Mom". She soon realised how much plastic there was in the food she buys at the supermarket. Chicken, one example, comes in a plastic covered package with small plastic inserts under the Chicken. In order to recycle things they must be washed and dried.

I learned from Schaub how plastic pollution raises the temperature of oceans, destroying reefs and acquatic life on a huge scale. CO2 released from the plastic disposal contributes much more to global warming than fossil fuels. Schaub searched for ways to cut down on her consumption of plastic. She acknowledges that her relative afluence made it possible for her to devote time and money to the project. 

About half the book is involved with her findings. I want to share some of them here. But first I wish to share two seminal thoughts, totally supported by Schaub's findings, by academic scholars.

Author Adam Minter gives a haunting description of the global plastics recycling center in Wen’an, China, and the scrap plastics trade in his 2013 book Junkyard Planet. At the time this “shadowy trade” often involved burning unusable plastics in the streets and dumping unusable plastics and plastic cleaning fluids into a giant pit on the outskirts of town. The people of the city were suffering strange new ailments involving strokes, paralysis, and lung scarring. “Wen’an is the most polluted place I’ve ever visited,” Minter writes.

Yes this is where Covid probably started.

In her book A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind , author Harriet A. Washington explains that “African Americans and other people of color are 79 percent more likely than white US residents to live in neighborhoods” of toxic environmental chemicals residents to live in neighborhoods” of toxic environmental chemicals emitted from sources such as “petrochemical plants, refineries, garbage dumps, (and) incinerators.” These are the poisonous places where we source, make, and dispose of our plastics. All the processes involved with plastic —from fracking to incineration— are not just toxic, they also disproportionately end up in low-income communities and communities of color.

From A Year of No Garbage by Eva Schaub

Top Ten Terrible Truths About Plastic 

1. Plastic is not really recyclable. 

2. “Single-stream” recycling is a lie. 

3. “Compostable” plastics are pretty much a total lie (with one notable exception). 

4. “Extreme Recycling” Programs are pretty much a total lie too. 

5. Forget one giant ocean garbage patch; there are five

. 6. Plastic drives climate change. 

7. Plastic is racist.

8. Plastics do not break down— or go away—ever

. 9. Plastics are in our water, air, and food. Also our bloodstream, and the placenta of newborn babies. 

10. There aren’t seven kinds of plastic as recycling symbols indicate; there are tens of thousands, all largely untested for effects on human health

From The Year of No Garbage by Eva Schaub

"In an article for The Nation, journalist Jamie Lincoln Kitman writes that “The leaded gas adventurers have profitably polluted the world on a grand scale and, in the process, have provided a model for the asbestos, tobacco, pesticide and nuclear power industries, and other twentieth-century corporate bad actors, for evading clear evidence that their products are harmful by hiding behind the mantle of scientific uncertainty.”The plastics industry should be on the above list of “corporate bad actors” too, although you could argue that in a way, it already is. Because of course the “leaded gas adventurers” who played fast and loose with the health and well-being of millions of people in using lead as an additive in gas, are in many cases the very same companies, or their descendants, who are emphatically ramping up plastics production, all the while pushing “better recycling,”“personal responsibility,” and “gee whiz, plastic sure seems safe.

I have quoted more than I normally do in a post because I hope my readers will come to ponder her thoughts.

She offers lots of good tips, list useful resources and is very open about the challenges of the project including a section on plastic free hygiene products which her daughters had little enthusiasm for as well as a funny segment about getting a bidget.

Serial memoirist Eve O. Schaub lives with her family in Vermont and enjoys performing experiments on them so she can write about it.

"During 2011 Eve wrote a blog about her family’s attempt to live and eat for a year without any added sugar in their food, which became the book Year of No Sugar (Sourcebooks, 2014). It has since been translated into Chinese, Hebrew and French. She has been a guest on the Dr. Oz Show, and FOX and Friends, and has appeared in numerous print and online outlets. She considers not hyperventilating on national television one of her greatest accomplishments.

Her second book, Year of No Clutter, (Sourcebooks, 2017) revealed her deepest, darkest secret: clutter. In it, she struggles to transform herself from a self-described “clutter-gatherer” into a neat, organized person who can actually walk through every room of her house and does not feel the need to keep everything from childhood raincoats to cat fur. As you suspected, the family gets roped in on this one too.

Currently Schaub is working on Year of No Garbage, blogging about living all of the year 2020 without throwing anything away, at all. Ever. As you can imagine it was super-easy and nothing much to tell there, but nevertheless she is currently finalizing the manuscript for this third and final family adventure story and if you happen to be an interested publisher then you are her new best friend.

In addition to her books, Eve has written online for Hyperallergic, The Belladonna Comedy, Little Old Lady Comedy and in print for Vermont Life, Vermont Magazine, Everyday Health, and the Boston Globe Online. Also the New Yorker printed her letter once, so that was pretty cool. She holds a BA and BFA from Cornell University, and a MFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology."

Eve imagines it would be fun to win several important awards. Her favorite word is antidisestablishmentarianism. She enjoys writing about herself in the third person. From www.eveschaub.com

Mel Ulm

The Reading Life