Stepping in the Write Direction

Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward is a very powerful memoir. She called it the hardest thing she’d ever written. It’s not a book you read, and then a few weeks later, can barely remember what it was about. The American Dream was hard won by many amidst the racism rampant in every state and institution, while others’ dreams were crushed by their sheer struggle to survive in a world where opportunity didn’t come easily, depending on the color of your skin. Jesmyn Ward and her siblings were raised in Mississippi during the 70s and 80s. Few who never saw a drinking fountain or bathroom labeled “colored” can understand there was a time when the income tax rules were the same for all races, the military cemeteries were filled with all races, but the benefits derived from freedom and tax revenues were not allocated equally because racism existed. The expression separate but equal, was, in reality, separate and unequal. It was a social crucible that burned hot, and those who came through it to reac...

Everything My Mother Taught Me by Alice Hoffman is a wonderful short story. Hoffman has such a gift for conveying the emotional map of a character in subtle but powerful ways. The book is primarily about a daughter, Adeline, and her acutely self absorbed young mother in the early 1900s. The author starts the book out with this passage, “There are those who insist that mothers are born with love for their children and place them before all other things, including their own needs and desires. This was not the case with us.” Adeline remembers, “She had told me often enough to keep my mouth shut, and now I did exactly that. I abolished all language on the day of my father’s funeral.”   After her father dies Adeline and her mother mother move to Thatcher Island on the tip of Cape Ann in Essex County, Massachusetts to work in a lighthouse alongside two couples. Adeline never speaks on the island, and when asked at one point whether she ever could speak, she writes an answer about not spe...

If Upton Sinclair’s purpose in writing his exposé of the meat packing industry was to “set forth the breaking of human hearts by a system which exploits the labor of men and women for profit,” No More Tears, Gardiner Harris’ staggering revelatory book, shines a bright light on Big Pharma, focusing on Johnson & Johnson’s and their competitors’ hunger for industry dominance, power, and profits with barely an afterthought for the health and lives of men, women, children, and the elderly who were prescribed their products, and if the almost unbelievable story doesn’t just break readers’ hearts, it will ensure skepticism for feckless government regulatory agencies and their problematic revolving door of appointments with those they have been charged with regulating.   Reading No More Tears may well create outrage at the legacy of powerful “careless people” that makes this F. Scott Fitzgerald Gatsby passage shimmer with the shared theme of zero accountability: “They were careless peo...