The 1619 Project, The Girls in the Wild Fig Tree, and Here We Go Again

The 1619 Project, a New Origin Story, by Nikole Hannah-Jones

I described this book to a friend by likening it to Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States, but focusing exclusively on the way race and racism have drenched and contaminated every aspect of American life, culture, politics, etc.

This book began from an essay by Dr. Nikole Hannah-Jones about how all of our country's sins and structures grew out of that first ship carrying enslaved people from Africa in 1619. Next came The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning “1619 Project," containing 18 essays and 36 poems and works of fiction that explore the legacy of slavery in America. 

The 1619 Project ignited the fears about critical race theory, and over half of states have made some attempt, some successful, to ban it in schools. That's the first reason you should read it!

The second reason to read it is to unlearn everything you have learned about race and racism in the United States and abroad. This is a new origin story for America. Must read. Outstanding and eye opening.

The Girls in the Wild Fig Tree, by Nice Leng'ete

I happened across this book when browsing for a new audio book. I loved it! Nice is a human rights activist who was born in Kenya as a member of the Maasai tribe. When it came time for her to be "cut" (female genital mutilation), she ran away. She knew that girls who got the cut always dropped out of school, and she wanted an education. 

She had to face down her family members and leaders from her tribe to assert her right to get an education and avoid the cut. She went onto become a vocal advocate for girls to have an alternative rite of passage to FGM. She had great sadness in her life, but she has a fierce passion and she learned how to use it.

Nice has an incredibly engaging voice and spirit. She is magnificent! 

Here We Go Again: My Life in Television, by Betty White

I sought this out on audio because I wanted to hear Betty White's voice again! It was published in 1995, so it has aged quite a bit and doesn't include anything from her last 26 years in television.

But for a child of the '60s, I enjoyed hearing about how she got her start in television. She was such a spirited trailblazer!! I also loved hearing about her love story with her beloved Alan and how she met him on Password. 

This won't win any literary prizes, but it was a pleasant listen to hear Betty once again!

Strength in What Remains, by Tracy Kidder

Before I read this book, I knew very little about Burundi. After reading this memorable narrative nonfiction, I feel more educated about this part of the world. Landlocked in the middle of Africa, Burundi is in the middle of Africa. It is one of the five poorest countries in the world with one of the lowest per capita gross domestic products. Germany and Belgium occupied Burundi and its neighbor Rwanda at the beginning of the 20th century, and the colonists contributed greatly to the divide and hatred among both countries' native Twa, Hutu, and Tutsi peoples. Burundi has had two mass genocides--one in 1972 (killings of Hutus by the Tutsi-dominated army) and one in 1993 (killings of Tutsis by the Hutus), resulting in around 250,000 deaths. The war-torn country is also the hungriest country in the world.

As a third-year medical school intern, Deogratias (Deo) Niyizonkiza fled the genocide in 1994. He arrived in New York City with $200 to his name and no English, and ended up sleeping in Central Park and eking out an existence by delivering groceries to rich New Yorkers for a few dollars a day. He spent any spare time he had trying to learn English by hanging out in bookstores (until he got kicked out). When someone first took him to a library, he was overjoyed!

Helped by a few kind people, he eventually enrolled at Columbia University, where he received a bachelor's degree in biochemistry and philosophy. Then he attended the Harvard School of Public Health, where he met Dr. Paul Farmer and began working at Partners in Health.

Deo helping an impovered child in Burundi

Tracy Kidder tells Deo's extraordinary story with vivid detail. I found myself entranced with Deo's tale of his early New York days and how he transformed himself through the help of others. He was haunted by his demons...how can you see so many people murdered by hand, with machetes, including children, and ever have a normal life? He felt great ambivalence when he received so much financial help from others, but without it he would have been back on the street.

In the last part of the book, Tracy Kidder writes about traveling back to Burundi and Rwanda with Deo, as he was establishing Village Health Works, a community-driven health center. (This last part of the book was a bit hard to follow at times.) In the first four years of operation, the center saw more than 50,000 patients, installed solar panels to power the facility, established an Internet system for electronic medical records, and built a 14,000-gallon water collection cistern to provide potable water to the center and surrounding communities. Amazing!

Deo now frequently lectures on global health and has received numerous awards. Most people do not return to Burundi after they leave, but Deo has dedicated his life to helping the poor in his native land. His life and story are astonishing.

The Invisible Girls: A Memoir

The Invisible Girls: A Memoir, by Sarah Thebarge

Sarah Thebarge survived grueling breast cancer, and a recurrence within a year, before moving west to Portland, Oregon, my hometown. While on the MAX light rail train, she meets a Somali immigrant and her five young daughters, and a friendship begins.

Thebarge alternates her story between getting to know and helping Hadhi and the girls and her travails enduring breast cancer treatment. She was raised in a strict evangelical religion, but went onto earn a degree at Yale and was in the middle of earning a journalism degree at Columbia when cancer struck. She also had a serious boyfriend and was close to becoming engaged. Ian, the boyfriend, was too weak to stick it out and abandoned her. Her church community apparently also abandoned her. She felt alone and bereft, her faith severely tested, when she picked up stakes to move to the west coast. Given the fact that I've had several friends endure and survive Stage 3 breast cancer similar to Thebarge's, I most appreciated reading about her experience and her feelings about having cancer. I also always like reading books set in my hometown!

When she got to know and began to help Hadhi, who didn't speak much English, she seemed to relate to the "invisible girls" because of what she had endured. She too felt like a stranger in a strange land.

This book has been accused of the "white savior complex." At times I wondered whether she could teach Hadhi how to fend for herself and survive rather than just rescuing her (do they have a sustainable life in the U.S.?). I was touched that Thebarge went out of her way to make this family feel welcome in the United States...a feeling they had not experienced before they met her. So much of their lives was difficult, but Thebarge brought joy to their poor, struggling family.

I felt that she could have delved a bit more into how she broke away from her traditional religious upbringing, and her feelings of betrayal when very few were there for her through cancer. And during one of the last chapters of the book she mentions some kind of identity theft or fraud but never explains what happened. (It felt like a big loose end was not tied up...perhaps an editorial oversight?)

The final chapter made me squirm a bit, as Thebarge and her friend reach out to a prostitute and do some proselytizing...mostly because, as a Christian, I'd rather that people learn about Christianity through the way we live our lives and not because we hit them over their heads with it. So even though she felt completely oppressed growing up in such a strict Christian denomination--in which women were not allowed to hold any leadership roles in the church whatsoever--she seems to move back to it at the end. That was a bit confusing. 

But Thebarge did help this family in dire straits. She brought delight into their lives and she helped them muddle through, and she too was enriched by the experience. She decided to write this book so she could raise money for the girls to go to college. I hope she is successful in her goal. 

I love this tidbit I found on Thebarge's blog, which is the ultimate takeaway from this book:

"And I realized this morning that solving the problem of invisibility doesn’t require legislation or institutional intervention.  It’s simple, and it’s easy, and it’s free.  It just takes all of us walking through life with open eyes and softened hearts, taking the risk and the time to tell someone else, 'You’re not invisible any more.  I care that you exist.  I see that you’re suffering.  It matters that you’re here.' 

How would our world change if every day, each of us told one person — just one —'I see you.  So you’re not invisible any more.'”

I participated in a campaign on behalf of Mom Central Consulting for Jericho Books. I received a product sample to facilitate my review.

Cutting for Stone: Twins, intertwined at birth and through difficulty and betrayal

Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese
My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

It always amazes me when someone whose primary profession is not writing manages to write a highly ambitious, sweeping saga of a novel like Cutting for Stone.

Abraham Verghese is a surgeon by trade, and it shows in this book. It's full of painstakingly detailed, sometimes graphic medical procedures. Fortunately, they are written in a way that a layperson can understand. It's not a book for the squeamish, which you will realize once you get into the first couple of chapters.

Cutting for Stone is about twin boys, Marion and Shiva, who are born to an Indian nun and a British surgeon. After their mother dies and their father runs off in grief, they are raised by two other doctors (Ghosh and Hema) at "Missing Hospital" in Addis Adaba, Ethiopia. Extremely different from one another but bound together from birth through blood and an invisible line between their heads, the brothers experience loss, betrayal, and distance.

Other reviewers were troubled by the narrator perspective of Marion, and I agree that at times it was jarring (especially when Marion was unconscious at one point!). Shiva in particular is very difficult to fathom at times, because of the singular perspective of his twin brother.

Marion has an obsessive love for Genet, his nanny's daughter, although it's difficult to understand why at times. She takes his affection for granted, and in one troubling scene, he has violent sex with her, I suppose as his way of getting even with her.

Verghese is an excellent descriptive writer--he's able to paint a canvas full of interesting, colorful locations--India, Ethiopia, the sea, New York, Boston--in addition to his ability to place you right in the operating room.

The book dragged for me at times, and I found the beginning and the end to be the most gripping.
As the aunt of twin boys and the friend of someone who bore twin girls and lost one on the day of her birth, I have seen twin kinship in action. I wonder whether Verghese is a twin or is close to twins. He seems to have a genuine understanding of the invisible bond between people who shared their mother's womb. When Marion fell ill, Shiva could sense it from a world away, in spite of the fact that they were somewhat estranged. This did not surprise me.

Even though this book took me awhile to finish (because of its length and at-times slow pace), I thought about it when I was not reading it--always a good sign.

As someone who has experienced the unique agony of having a loved one be medically fragile and close to death, I appreciated Verghese's efforts to express this perspective.

At one point, Thomas Stone (father of the twins) shares a letter from her mother about her son dying in surgery, and no one offered him any words of comfort--"Before I was asked to leave the room in a very rough manner, I must tell you that I saw my son was terrified and there was no one who addressed his fear...I saw no sign of the slightest bit of human kindness. My son and I were irritants. Your team would have preferred for me to be gone and for him to be quiet....My son's last conscious memory will be of people ignoring him. My last memory of him will be of my little boy, watching in terror as his mother is escorted out of the room. It is the graven image I will carry to my own deathbed. The fact that people were attentive to his body does not compensate for them ignoring his being." This so perfectly captures the feeling of desperation felt by a parent whose child is not being cared for with compassion, respect, and understanding.

Later when Marion was deathly ill, Shiva lay down next to him on his hospital bed, head to head, as they lay in the womb and during childhood...and Marion's intracranial pressure went down immediately. This is akin to those times when we would visit our premature son in the NICU and he would feel our presence--his oxygen saturation would go up.

Even during the times when Thomas Stone and his son, Marion, led solitary, reserved private lives, they displayed the kinder, more human side of medicine.