Five Days: The Fiery Reckoning of an American City

by Wes Moore with Erica L. Green (One World 2020; printed in the US by Random House)

In April of 2015, a young man named Freddie Gray died in police custody in Baltimore, Maryland. The Black Lives Matter movement was two years old, and people were beginning to pay attention to the number of young Black men, often unarmed, who were dying in encounters with police. The city of Baltimore became the scene of protests and riots over five days, April 25 – 29. Moore and Green focus on eight people who lived through these protests: Tawanda Jones, a teacher whose brother, Tyrone West, had died in police custody in 2013, and she has never given up her fight for justice for him; John Angelos, the owner of the Baltimore Orioles; Marc Partee, the Inner Harbor police commander; Greg Butler, who almost overcame the odds of leaving the ghetto of West Baltimore for a college education and an athletic career; Nick Mosby, a Baltimore City Councilman married to Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby; Anthony Williams, manager of a popular Baltimore skating rink known as the Shake & Bake; Jenny Egan, a juvenile public defender in Baltimore; and Billy Murphy, a Baltimore attorney and former mayoral candidate. There is an introductory timeline of Freddie Gray’s short life (premature birth, lead poisoning in early childhood, interrupted education, life on the streets, encounters with the law and imprisonment) and, in more detail, the fateful day–April 12, 2015, when Freddie was arrested for making eye contact with a police officer at 8:40 am and trying to run away. Seven days later, he was declared dead. Then, in short chapters of just a few pages each, Moore and Greene advance the story of Baltimore’s riots as seen through the eyes of these eight people. Two of them are white (Jenny Egan and John Angelos); the rest are African-American.

This is followed by an epilogue that tells what has happened to the eight people since 2015. And then Wes Moore’s “Author’s Note 2020”, which considers what happened and what needs to be done. In a way, this was my favorite part of the book; it provides a glimpse into Moore’s thinking about how to begin to solve America’s problems with racism and poverty. I wish I could include that entire Note here, but instead I will just copy out some sentences which really resonate with me:

*Freddie’s short life underscores a dramatic truth: wealth and income inequality define modern American life.

*Some critics will counter that poverty is a choice made by those who are lazy or who lack the desire to change their lives for the better. I agree that poverty is a choice. But that choice is not made by the people who live under its oppressive effects. Rather, the choice is ours. It’s the choice of the government that represents our priorities and allocates our investments. It’s a choice reinforced by the companies we patronize and the organizations we support.

*In America, help from society is closely indexed to your ability to work. Those disconnected from the labor market. . . are largely excluded from the societal safety net. . . . Our society’s insistence on limiting help to those who “deserve it,” as indicated by their status in the labor market, has a profound impact on the capacity of those living in deep poverty to escape.

*. . . There are few impacts as pernicious and unrelenting on the development and life prospects of people than lead poisoning. Lead poisoning is a nationwide and preventable crisis.

*It’s our time to use our individual voices, power, will, and privilege to address economic injustice. To fight for those who have been consistently left out. Pay homage to those who worked tirelessly to clean and fix houses, roads, and bridges that they were not allowed to live in or travel on. Those who built economies that they could not participate in. Those who were repeatedly asked to be patient, told that the American story would include them, but never saw their place in line advance.Those who were unknowingly writing the American story, but were never acknowledged as authors. . . .

And this quote from the Prologue: This book is about more than Freddie Gray’s death and its aftermath. This book is about more than Baltimore. It’s about privilege, history, entitlement, greed, and pain. And complicity. Mine. All of ours.

At this writing, Wes Moore is a candidate for Governor of Maryland.

The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

by Michael Lewis (Norton 2021)

A cannot-put-down book about the smart, brave people who have been trying to save us from the COVID-19 (and also future, as yet unknown) pandemic, in particular:

• Dr. Charity Dean, chief public health officer in Santa Barbara County, who took the job to its logical limits, and whose 12/21/19 premonition that “it has started” gives the book its title;
• Carter Mecher, a doctor/administrator at the Bureau of Veterans Affairs (aka “the Redneck Epidemiologist”) whose ability to think outside the box is superseded only by his ability to fly under the radar;

and a host of other memorable characters: Laura Glass, whose middle school science fair project got her father researching pandemics; Rajeev Venkayya, who sat down and wrote up the first draft of a pandemic-fighting plan; Richard Hatchett, who teamed up with Carter Mecher to advise the White House how to fight a pandemic; Joe DeRisi and his Chan Zuckerberg Biohub technologies, and others. We learn how masking and social distancing have long been fallback strategies in the absence of vaccines for new viruses, and that schools and school buses are both designed to pack the greatest number of children into the smallest possible space, making them superspreaders from the get-go. We read on, appalled, knowing how it will turn out when the counsel of these brilliant people, who find one another kind of by accident and form a working group they call the Wolverines (with Dr. Dean given the title of “Wolverette”), is ignored by those in power. A very worthwhile read.

Autism in Heels: The Untold Story of a Female Life on the Spectrum

by Jennifer Cook O’Toole (Skyhorse Publishing, 2018)

I’ve always been interested in autism. I’ve read most of Temple Grandin’s books. I was reading Thinking in Pictures back in the 90s when I first noticed the similarities between Grandin and my then very young daughter, who doctors assured me was “not autistic”. . . until one day the diagnosis ASD appeared in her medical record (It is still there.). But I had somehow missed the work of Jennifer Cook O’Toole, who wrote a book I wish I had given my daughter in those painful adolescent years: The Asperkid’s (Secret) Book of Social Rules: The Handbook of Not-So-Obvious Social Guidelines for Tweens and Teens with Asperger Syndrome (2013). (Two years later, she wrote Sisterhood of the Spectrum: An Asperger Chick’s Guide to Life.) Autism in Heels is O’Toole’s memoir of growing up with undiagnosed autism. Extremely smart, multi-talented, and high-functioning, she was crippled by her inability to understand and follow the complex social rules that govern all of our interactions with others. This led to ostracism, bullying, self-doubt, perfectionism, abusive relationships, anorexia, and more, all of which is shared in painful detail in the book. Jennifer O’Toole never realized that she was on the spectrum until her three children, including her youngest, a girl, received the diagnosis. As she learned more about autism, she began to question her own life story, especially after her daughter’s diagnosis. Since then, she has become a voice for the many girls and women worldwide who are neurologically different, whose sensitivities rule their daily lives, who struggle to make and maintain friendships. Autism looks different in girls than in boys, but it can still make lives difficult and can sometimes result in astonishingly self-destructive behaviors and choices.

Maybe it isn’t too late to give my daughter those books.

Mother Tongue: My Family’s Globe-Trotting Quest to Dream in Mandarin, Laugh in Arabic, and Sing in Spanish

by Christine Gilbert (Avery, an imprint of Penguin Random House, 2016)

Christine Gilbert must have the most accommodating husband in the history of the world. When she decided she wanted to take a few years learning Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish, he went right along with the plan. Gilbert read a lot about bilingualism and language acquisition (her sources are listed in the Notes) and interviewed some of the researchers, and then set off to try and learn some of the most difficult languages for an English-speaking American to learn: Chinese first. Chinese, according to what I have heard, does not have a complicated grammar, but the four tones are very difficult for an English speaker to grasp, and reading and writing require years of memorizing characters. Arabic is one of the most complex of all languages, and the writing system, while easier than Chinese, is very challenging for an English speaker. Compared to these, the third and final target language, Spanish, is a piece of cake. Besides which, Gilbert had already studied Spanish and spent some time in Guatemala.

The family started out in Beijing as winter set in, not realizing that the infamous air pollution is at its worst during the winter. Gilbert, her husband Drew, and their toddler, Cole, immediately got sick and stayed that way. Gilbert found an apartment and a tutor, but not a class, so her opportunities to use the language were actually quite limited. To avoid breathing the horrible air, the family sequestered themselves in the apartment. In the end, they gave up and left. Gilbert did not achieve fluency in Mandarin–far from it.

Next, the family repaired to Thailand, where they had friends, to decide where to go so Gilbert could learn Arabic, and they ended up in Beirut (maybe everything had to begin with Bei-), where they rented a house and Gilbert joined an actual class, which was better, although the Lebanese dialect she set out to learn would not serve her very well in other Arab countries. They loved Beirut, but eventually it got a little too risky to remain there, so they left again, and this time ended up in Mexico, in a little town on the Pacific coast in the state of Jalisco (Bucerias–Bu- instead of Bei. Close!). By this time, Gilbert was pregnant with their second child, a baby girl. Little Stella was born in Puerto Vallarta, a Mexican citizen. And Gilbert’s Spanish did come back and get better. Little Cole also learned Spanish (he had picked up a few Chinese words despite the family’s pollution-induced isolation, and more Lebanese Arabic). For some reason I never fully understood, the Gilberts chose not to remain in Mexico, where Stella’s birth would have enabled them to acquire citizenship, and which they seemed to love, but instead they settled in Barcelona, a diglossic (Spanish/Catalan) city close enough to the Middle East to afford visits to Beirut.

I found Gilbert’s plan to be kind of wacky but intriguing and marveled at the circumstances that allow this couple to live anywhere they want in the world and enabled her to spend eight hours a day learning foreign languages. I was not surprised at the failure of the plan in Beijing and was impressed by Gilbert’s persistence to carry on with her plan despite that failure. I agree with her conclusion that the key to learning languages is to deeply appreciate and learn the culture of the country where the language is spoken. And I am mostly amazed that her husband went along with it all, even though he did not intend to study the languages (and I wonder just how he is getting on in Barcelona–still monolingual?).

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

by Isabel Wilkerson (Random House, 2010)

Writing to address the need for “a comprehensive treatment of the century-long story of black migration,” Isabel Wilkerson tells the story of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North and West by telling the stories of three people who were part of it:

1. Ida Mae Brandon Gladney of Chickasaw County, Mississipppi, who migrated with her husband and children in 1937, first to Milwaukee and then to Chicago;
2. George Swanson Starling of Wildwood, Florida, who migrated to New York City in 1945; and
3. Robert Joseph Pershing Foster of Monroe, Louisiana, who migrated to Los Angeles in 1953.

Thus, Wilkerson includes three decades and three typical migration routes (because people from certain Southern locations tended to end up in certain Northern/Western “receiving cities”). She begins in each case with where the migrant was born and grew up, his/her family, education, work, and the kinds of discrimination and outright terror suffered in the home town or county. For example, George Starling worked picking citrus fruit after his father refused to pay his college tuition, and he tried to organize the other pickers to demand their rights (modest rights: a very slightly higher price per box of fruit), which resulted in his being hunted by the grower’s goons. He was lucky to escape with his life.

Having set the stage by explaining what the migrants were fleeing, Wilkerson tells the story of the journey itself and then describes the migrants’ reception in the receiving cities. Ida Mae Gladney was traveling with her husband (also George, which was a bit confusing for me) and two small children. They took the train north, riding in the “Jim Crow car” until they crossed the border into the Midwest, eating food packed in shoeboxes, having to change trains in Chicago, reaching their final destination of her sister’s home in Milwaukee. Robert Foster, a surgeon, traveled in his private car, but the trip was excruciating because finding places to sleep, for a person of color, was next to impossible in Texas and unpredictably difficult once he reached the Southwest. He nearly didn’t make it across the desert. He arrived in Los Angeles knowing only one person, a fellow doctor named Beck, who offered to refer patients to him, but he felt compelled to try Oakland first; Oakland proved unwelcoming, and he returned to LA, where he struggled for several years to build a practice. Californians were just as racist as Louisianans, but the rules were harder to figure out, and even Black people preferred White doctors.

Then Wilkerson describes how the migrants settled down in what she calls the “New World”: Ida Mae Gladney becomes a nurse’s aide; George Starling goes to work as a porter on the trains running up and down the East Coast; Robert Foster builds a successful practice treating the black underclass in Los Angeles and becomes a wealthy man. She ends with their final years and the deaths of Starling and Foster; Ida Mae Gladney, the eldest of the three and the first to migrate north, was still alive at the end of the book (though she died in 2004, as stated in a brief Afterword between Notes on Methodology and Acknowledgments).

In between the stories of the three migrants, Wilkerson weaves the bigger story of the Great Migration, with facts and statistics and findings from studies and censuses. But it is the biographies of these three ordinary/extraordinary people that keep the reader engaged throughout the book.

In the Epilogue, a mini-treatise by itself, Wilkerson observes that the Great Migration touched everyone: those that were part of it and their descendants, those who were left behind and their descendants, those who already lived in the Northern and Western cities where the migrants settled and their descendants, later immigrants of color, and American culture as a whole. Popular imagination blamed the migrants for bringing the problems of crime, welfare dependency, unemployment, broken families, illegitimate children with them and inflicting them on the populations that were already there, but Wilkerson points out that research does not support these conclusions; the migrants tended to be hard-working family people who stayed out of trouble and who were, on the whole, better educated than those already living in the cities they settled in (black but sometimes also white). She speculates that the same character traits that enabled the migrants to pull up roots and venture into the unknown enabled them to make the best of the very difficult situations they found themselves in.

Migrants or children of migrants are among the most accomplished, successful, and famous black Americans. They were the first black mayors in the receiving cities of Cleveland, Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and San Francisco. Music made by those who migrated, usually as children, or their descendants, changed the world: Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, the Jacksons, John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, Nat King Cole, Diana Ross, Whitney Houston, Queen Latifah. The genres of jazz, rock, R&B, the blues and hip-hip were all created by migrants or their descendants (would they have done so had they remained in the South?). Other high-achieving African Americans who were migrants or descendants of migrants include James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Michelle Obama, Jesse Owens, Serena and Venus Williams, Bill Cosby, Condoleezza Rice, Berry Gordy, Mae Jemison, August Wilson, Spike Lee, and Isabel Wilkerson herself. Indeed it might have been easier to list famous black Americans whose history did not begin in the South; the list might have been shorter!

Wilkerson muses how her three protagonists represent a different “aspect of the emigrant psyche” and “patterns of adjustment” seen among the migrants. Robert Foster, the most financially successful of the three, rejected the South entirely and suffered all his life from insecurities. George Starling mourned his lost educational opportunities but gained psychological freedom from the South. Ida Mae Gladney “had the humblest trappings but was perhaps the richest of them all. She had lived the hardest life, been given the least education, seen the worst the South could hurl at her people, and did not let it break her. She . . . never forsook her origins, never changed the person she was deep inside, never changed her accent. . . . ” She lived surrounded by Northerners, white flight, street crime, and drug deals, “but it was as if she were immune to it all. She took the best of what she saw in the North and the South and interwove them in the way she saw fit. . . .”

The reasons for the Great Migration include racist persecution in the South (Jim Crow and sharecropping), changes in cotton production, but Wilkerson considers the possibility that it was the Migration that impacted the persecution (the number of lynchings decreased over the period of the Great Migration) and cotton industry (mechanization was due to the loss of human labor availability). Wilkerson writes, “in the end, it could be said that the common denominator for leaving was the desire to be free. . . . They left to pursue some version of happiness, whether they achieved it or not.”

Finally, Wilkerson points out the similarities between the people of the Great Migration and other immigrants to the United States, although the migrants themselves vehemently reject this label, since they were born U.S. citizens and their roots were much deeper than those of the immigrants that came after them: “The black people who left were citizens, and many of their forebears had been in this land before the country was founded.” She ends with this: “Perhaps it is not a question of whether the migrants brought good or ill to the cities they fled to or were pushed or pulled to their destinations, but a question of how they summoned the courage to leave in the first place or how they found the will to press beyond the forces against them and the faith in a country that had rejected them for so long. By their actions, they did not dream the American Dream, they willed it into being by a definition of their own choosing. They did not ask to be accepted but declared themselves the Americans that perhaps few others recognized but that they had always been deep within their hearts.”

Every American should read this book.

My Life in Seven Suitcases

by Gillian Grozier (KGL Publishing, 2018)

In less than fifty pages, Gillian Grozier matter-of-factly narrates her amazing life, beginning with her childhood in England during and after the Second World War and ending as her ninth decade begins in Frederick, Maryland, just twenty miles from where I sit blogging at my dining room table in Gaithersburg! In between, she manages to navigate two marriages, three children, alcoholism, and a plethora of careers that exhausted this reader. A writer, poet, journalist, and artist, Gillian has had so many jobs and careers that I lost count. She went through very tough times, but she has always landed on her feet eventually. She experienced both want and prosperity; she used the prosperity to travel to some really amazing destinations (China, Tibet, Indonesia, Turkey…). And she experienced both the sexism of the fifties and sixties and the relative liberation of the present.

The stages of her life are organized according to the luggage she used at the time–an ingenious and different way to divide up the many periods she lived through.

I am very much looking forward to meeting Gillian, both virtually and, when circumstances allow, in person.

A Hole in the Wind: A Climate Scientist’s Bicycle Journey Across the United States

by David Goodrich (Pegasus Books, 2017)

I love walking/cycling memoirs. I’ve never done any distance walking or cycling, not even one day, and I suspect that I would thoroughly hate it, but I really enjoy reading about others’ journeys, and this is just such a memoir. In 2011, recently retired climate scientist David Goodrich loaded up his touring bike with all manner of gear (clothing, food, camping equipment, laptop, tools and spare parts, water…) and set off for the Oregon coast from his Maryland home. I can’t imagine riding a bike from Gaithersburg to Rockville! But Goodrich is one serious biker.

He’s also serious about climate change, and one of his goals on the ride was to talk to people about it–something he found surprisingly difficult to do, because most people didn’t want to talk about it–perhaps because that would require acknowledging it in a way they had not done. He did do some invited talks to school groups until the school year ended, and found young people more receptive. He records the evidence of climate change he found along his journey, such as the trees killed by pine bark beetles, changing the forest from living green to dead gray… depressing. The book is a way to communicate the awful truth of what we are doing to the planet, at least to those who are willing to listen (or in this case, read).

The book is set up chronologically going westward, sort of. I say sort of because the 2011 Trans America ride was preceded by a partial ride through the fire district in 2000 and followed by a trip around Glacier National Park in 2016. Goodrich inserts anecdotes from those two rides into his account of the cross-continental ride which is the main focus of the book, which is a little confusing but ultimately doesn’t reallymatter.

He includes stories about the people he meets or reconnects with along the way, as well as encounters with dogs, truckers, hills, switchbacks, rainstorms, and the incredible wind he rode into as he crossed the Great Plains, the source of the book’s title. He recounts some of the history of the places he visits, like Stronghold Table on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where the Lakota gathered before the infamous massacre at Wounded Knee, where U.S. government troops slaughtered the indigenous people who had surrendered to them. The story of Stronghold, Wounded Knee, Sitting Bull, Short Bull, Wovoka and the Ghost Dancers, is really distressing to read. How Americans can be so smug about “all men are created equal” and “liberty and justice for all”, I don’t know.

Goodrich tends to skip lightly over the physical suffering I am sure he had to endure. He mentions sore knees, spills that resulted in scrapes and bruises, brushes with dehydration, but ultimately makes it all sound not so bad. The parts about history and climate change are sobering; the memoir of a really amazing accomplishment for someone of any age is engrossing.

P.S. If I remember correctly, I met David Goodrich about a year ago at a Climate Action Lobby Night in Annapolis. We spoke about his book, and I added it to my To Read list. I finished the book on the last day of the 2021 Climate Action Lobby Week, during which I joined climate activists from around the state to advocate for the Climate Solutions Now Act, the Consideration of Climate and Labor Act, the Transit Safety Investment Act, and a bill allowing Community Choice Energy in Montgomery County, where I live. Maybe Dave took part in the virtual lobbying this year too. Maybe we will meet up in Annapolis again next year; who knows?

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson (Random House 2020)

Isabel Wilkerson lays out a convincing case for an American caste system based on race. Of the numerous caste systems in the world, she compares the American one to two others: the well-known caste system of India and that of Nazi Germany. Caste, “a stubbornly fixed ranking of human value,” is determined according to different factors in different systems. Our American caste system uses various physical attributes (skin color, hair texture, facial features…) to identify and mark members of our subordinate caste–African-Americans, the U.S. equivalent of India’s Dalit (“Untouchables”). Succeeding waves of immigrants, facing discrimination from those already here, have learned quickly to distance themselves from the subordinate caste so as to avoid their inescapable fate of poverty and powerlessness.

Wilkerson distinguishes between racism and casteism as follows: Racism is “an act or institution that mocks, harms, assumes or attaches inferiority or stereotype on the basis of the social construct of race,” whereas casteism is “an act or structure that seeks to limit, hold back, or put someone in a defined ranking, seeks to keep someone in their place by elevating or denigrating that person on the basis of their perceived category.” (pg. 70) She points out that racism and casteism frequently, but not always, occur together.

Wilkerson lists Eight Pillars of Caste: (1) Divine will and the laws of nature, (2) Heritability, (3) Endogamy and the control of marriage and mating, (4) Purity versus pollution, (5) Occupational Hierarchy, (6) Dehumanization and stigma, (7) Terror as enforcement, cruelty as a means of control, and (8) Inherent Superiority versus inherent inferiority. She devotes a chapter to each.

For me, one of the most difficult chapters to read was Chapter Eight, “The Nazis and the Acceleration of Caste.” In this chapter, Wilkerson tells how when the Nazis were creating the Third Reich, they came to the American South to learn from the Jim Crow laws there. Wilkerson writes: “The Nazis were impressed by the American custom of lynching its subordinate caste of African-Americans, having become aware of the ritual torture and mutilations that typically accompanied them. Hitler especially marveled at the American “knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death.” (pg. 81) The fact that some of the laws “went overboard” in the opinion of the Nazis is chilling. The chapter also describes how Hitler seized power: “Hitler had risen as an outside agitator, a cult figure enamored of pageantry and rallies. . . . [He] saw himself as the voice of the Volk, of their grievances and fears, especially those in the rural districts, as a god-chosen savior, running on instinct. He had never held elective office before.” (pg. 82) Sound familiar?

The following chapter, “The Evil of Silence,” was also unbearable reading, with its graphic descriptions of lynchings and the bloodthirstiness of the crowds that gathered to witness them and sent picture postcards of the dead victims to their friends. Truly, this is Evil.

Wilkerson reminds us that race is not real. We are all members of the same race, the human race. Race as we think of it today was created as a way to justify the enslavement of Africans. Europeans from various countries never thought of themselves of white before they came to America (they were Hungarians or Portuguese or Dutch), and Africans today do not see themselves as black (they are Yoruba, Igbo, or San). We created this monster, and Wilkerson challenges us to dismantle the system that keeps some people on the lowest rung of our societal ladder, while elevating others. In the Epilogue, she challenges us to refuse to acquiesce to the system; to develop radical empathy for those in the subordinate caste, by educating ourselves and by listening with humility to the experiences of others. She writes, “The price of privilege is the moral duty to act when one sees another person treated unfairly” (pg. 386), and predicts that “a world without caste would set everyone free.” (pg. 388)

The book is not hard to read (except emotionally). The language is clear, the chapters short and there are plenty of real-world examples, including the author’s own experiences navigating the caste system here and abroad.

Wilkerson’s previous book was The Warmth of Other Suns, about the Great Migration of formerly enslaved people to the northern states. I have heard that it is also excellent, and have placed a hold on it with Libby. I should get it in about 3 months. It’s a good thing that Wilkerson’s books are in such demand. We (especially white people) need to read them.

Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man

by Mary L. Trump (Simon & Schuster 2020)

This expose by Donald Trump’s niece, the daughter of his elder brother Freddy, who died at age 42, is blunt in its assessment of Donald Trump’s character (lacking) and abilities (few). It’s the Donald Trump we all suspected, unmasked by someone in his own family. Mary Trump has a doctorate in clinical psychology, so she is well-positioned to analyze her uncle’s pathologies and weaknesses as well as to speculate as to their origin. That this may be unprofessional doesn’t make it less fascinating. But there was little I hadn’t already concluded from observing Trump’s (mis)behavior, and I am not one of those who needed convincing. Trump’s feckless “base” is never going to pick up this book, and even if they did, they would refuse to believe that their hero is in reality a frightened child still trying to gain his father’s love.

The father, Fred Trump, Sr., was a sociopath like his second son, incapable of love or kindness, intentionally turning his own children against one another. As dysfunctional families go, this one is a doozy. Fred Sr. was at least a savvy businessperson (if not an honest one), which is more than one can say about his son the president. According to Mary, Fred Sr. kept throwing money at Donald to compensate for his incompetence. Later, banks taken in by his over-confidence and brashness would do the same, in an effort to shore up the Trump empire; they inexplicably paid him a monthly “allowance” so that he could continue to fool the world into thinking he was a success.

Not surprisingly, Mary Trump devotes a significant portion of the book to her father, Freddy. Freddy did not have the killer instinct that Donald had/has, and he was quick to internalize his father’s criticism, which completely undermined his self-esteem. He was a naturally fun-loving, likable person, but he was unable to hold his own in the face of his father’s put-downs and cruelty. In an effort to escape the world of real estate, he joined the military and became a pilot. He even flew for TWA for a year (his father called him a “bus driver in the sky”), but due to his alcoholism, he was eventually forced to go back to Trump Management, Fred Sr.’s empire, where his father slowly destroyed him. He died a premature, lonely death, abandoned by his family, barely mentioned by his parents after his death, his children (Mary and her brother Fritz) cheated out of Freddy’s inheritance by their aunts and uncles. You couldn’t make this stuff up. If you read about this family in a novel, you would think it was too farfetched.

I wondered, when I started the book, if it might make me feel sorry for Donald Trump. Hardly. For his siblings, his mother, his nieces and nephews, possibly. But not for him. He grew up a spoiled brat and a bully, egged on by his unscrupulous and cruel father. Had the father been a normal human being, would Donald have grown up otherwise? Possibly. (Probably?) We will never know. We each get only one shot at life. Donald Trump used his father’s money, connections, and power to become the sorry specimen he is today. Mary Trump’s book must have taken courage to write and send out into the world. It will not endear her to her family.

Favorite quote:

Donald today is much as he was at three years old: incapable of growing, learning, or evolving, unable to regulate his emotions, moderate his responses, or take in or synthesize information. (p.197)

Finding Latinx: In Search of the Voices Redefining Latino Identity

by Paola Ramos (Vintage 2020)

Daughter of a Mexican journalist and a Cuban mother, journalist Paola Ramos sets off on a journey around the United States in search of what it means to be Latinx, the term chosen to replace Latino/a/os/as or Hispanic because it is more inclusive. She aims to show not only what Latinx people have in common but also what separates them: language and culture in the case of the indigenous people of Guatemala and other parts of Latin America; race in the case of Afro-Cubans, Afro-Mexicans, Afro-Colombians, etc.; politics in the case of Democrats, Republicans, and Trumpists; social class; and gender identity.

Ramos’ book explores the lives of individuals, starting with herself (brought up in Spain and Miami), rarely resorting to statistics and academic research. I see it as a personal journey more than an academic one (which is why I categorized it as a memoir). She made me aware of groups that had flown under my (and most people’s, apparently) radar all my life, like the “silent” Mayan asylum seekers who were called Latino/a even though they could not speak Spanish, and therefore chose not to speak at all. And I have long been curious about the descendants of African slaves in Latin America. They are Black, and they are Hispanic (or Brazilian); how to choose only one identity for oneself in this case? Also, gay and trans Latinx have their own perspective and struggle. Ramos shines a light on them as well. She interviews a young Afro-Cuban man who is a Trump supporter and president of the Miami Proud Boys chapter. Huh? She interviews drag queen Sicarya Jr., drag persona of Ado Arevalo. So many aspects of the Latinx population of the U.S.

Favorite quotation: “It’s okay to differ. It’s okay not to see eye to eye. The point is there is not one way to be Latino in the United States. There is not one way to feel Latino in this country. Not one way to look Latino or sound Latino. And at the moment, the only label that can honor that collective truth and accommodate that spectrum of ambiguity is the Latinx banner.”