The Fall of Rome by Martha Southgate

The Fall of Rome by Martha Southgate is set on the campus of Chelsea, an elite, all male, Connecticut boarding school.  The story is told from the perspectives of three different characters:  Jerome Washington, a Latin teacher and the only black member of the faculty; Jana Hansen, a white literature teacher, new to the school; and Rashid Bryson, one of a handful of African American financial aid student who is struggling to adjust to the rigorous academic culture of the school (for which his inner city school has not prepared him) and life among a wealthy student population. Rashid decides to attend Chelsea the wake to his older brother’s tragic death.  His parents, once supportive of his education, are now so traumatized by the grief of losing a son that they are emotionally absent from Rashid.  Rashid sees Chelsea as a way to escape the pain of his home life and at the same time pay tribute to his brother.

An overarching theme of the book is race and class diversity, and the character’s different perspectives on these issues play into the events that move the plot of the story. The fact that Chelsea has only one black faculty member and that he is a scholar of classical Roman antiquity speaks volumes about the school’s issues with diversity.  That Jerome so strongly identifies with the historical roots of European culture also symbolizes the disconnect he feels with his own roots and culture.  Jerome feels that he achieved his position in life as a result of his own hard work and feels that other African Americans from lower class backgrounds must rise above their condition in the same way he did. Jana, on the other hand, is more liberal in her ideas and is determined to provide the help Rashid needs to adjust to the rigors of the exclusive private education he signed up for. 

The book is fast paced and held my interest throughout. The characters are complex, and while Southgage illuminates the conflicts between them, she never fully resolves them.  I think this is the mark of a great writer.  Her novel doesn’t neatly solve Rashid’s (or Chelsea’s) problems, but we see significant growth and change, and even some hope.  The book is a commentary on the state or race in our culture today, particularly in elite private academies.  This is a very good book and a must read for students in a school like ours.  

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Here's a short film I made with my new iPad. It's from my summer blogging class. 

Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones

Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones is set in Southwest Atlanta in the 1980s.  Jones grew up in Atlanta and this is her third novel set in the  the city. The story in Silver Sparrow is told from the point of view of two different teenage girls. Jones chronicles the life  of two half-sisters who grow up only a few miles apart but didn't know each other.  They have different  mothers, yet shared the same father.  James Witherspoon married Laverne (Chaurisse's mother) when she  was 14 years old and pregnant.  While he was married to Laverne, James became involved with Gwen (Dana's mother) and  fathered Dana.  He lives with Laverne and Chaurisse, but visits Gwen and  Dana on Wednesday nights.  Dana feels second best to Chaurisse because  Chaurrise is his daughter in "public," while James keeps Dana hidden, afraid  that his wife and other daughter will discover her existence.  In some  ways Dana feels fortunate because she knows about Chaurisse while  Chaurisse knows nothing about Dana.  When the two girls inevitably meet,  Chaurisse is fascinated with Dana because she has long, thick hair and  Chaurisse considers her to be beautiful, a "silver girl."  Chaurisse  believes she is chubby and unattractive and feels inferior to Dana.  Dana, of course, cannot tell  Chaurisse the truth, and this sets the stage for complications in their  relationship.  Through this story, Jones explores the damage lies and  secrets do to relationships of all kinds.  Ultimately James is found out, and though  there is intense competition for his love and attention, nobody wins in  this sad story.

Tayari Jones also wrote Leaving Atlanta, which won a number of awards.  The backdrop for the story is the Atlanta child murders from 1979-81.  Jones was a child living in Southwest Atlanta during the time when thirty African American children in nearby neighborhoods were murdered.  For more information about Tayari Jones and her books, click here.  To find out what she is reading, visit here blog.  Jones will be in Decatur on Thursday, July 28, at Eagle Eye Bookshop.

What I'm Reading Now

I usually read more than one book at a time.  Right now I'm reading Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okaoafor.    

Who Fears Death is a post apocalyptic novel set in a futuristic subsaharan Africa.  The heroine is a 16-year-old girl who is a social outcast because she is the product of a violent rape as an act of war between two tribes.  Onyesonwu is discovering that she has magical powers like shape shifting and traveling to the land of the dead, and she must learn how to use her power wisely.  The author uses fiction as a means to address intense social issues like racism, war, sexism, genocide, rape and female circumcision.  She combines themes of race, class and gender with fantasy fiction to create a world that's eerily mirrors our own.  This book is not for the faint of heart.  There are some brutal scenes in which the author does not flinch from portraying scenes of violence.  Interestingly, it's not that depressing because our heroine clearly intends to overcome the horrific discrimination she faces. Will she find her power?  Will she ultimately use it for the good?  I don't know yet, because I haven't finished the book.

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

While the summer isn't over yet, this is the most powerful book I've read so far.  Author of Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer has established himself as a master story teller.  In his first two books, you get the sense that he's drawing on real life experiences and family histories to create his fiction, and in Eating Animals, you get to see the source of his material.  Eating Animals is Foer's work of non-fiction.  Weaving a tapestry of stories of his family history with stories of the farmers, activists, animals, and virtually everyone he meets along the way,  he exposes the cruelty of animal agriculture in a way that no one has before.  When his son was born, he wanted to be a good father, so he decided to investigate how to feed him in a way that was truly nourishing and healthy. His book, the story of that investigation, combines impeccable research (with 17 pages of footnotes),  devastating data and brilliant storytelling.  It is his storytelling, however, that keeps the reader interested and engaged, even in places where the cruelty is difficult to bear. Throughout the book, he intertwines stories of his doting Jewish grandmother's complex relationship to food.  A holocaust survivor who came very close to starving before the end of WW II (and a quirky, compelling character who is recognizable throughout his fiction) she has experienced a trauma that she transmits to succeeding generations of her family.  Although he never makes a direct comparison, the reader cannot help but compare, through his juxtapostion of stories, the cruelty of the Jewish holocaust to the slaughter of animals he describes so unflinchingly.  Foer makes a case for the argument that our capacity for disconnection and denial is at the center of all human cruelty.  Our relationship to food is central to our identities and our relationship with others, yet we feed ourselves without knowing (and often willfully denying) where our nourishment comes from.  Indeed, the conscious denial of not only the slaughter methods, but the conditions in which most farm animals are breed and raised, is necessary for us to continue to support the industry with our money and our appetites.  Foer's book is not judgemental, just sensible and compassionate.  Like all serious writers, he does not back away from emotional truth.  Characteristically, where most writers stop, Foer dares to contintue writing, always taking his topics a little deeper than the reader is prepared to go.

This book seriously challenged the way I eat.  Like Foer, I had vascillated between vegetarianism and meat eating for a number of years.  While watching Food, Inc. had a temporary effect, reading Eating Animals was far more powerful.  Why is this?  I believe it's because of Foer's brilliant writing: his compelling characterizations of people and animals goes beyond the mere facts of the matter (which only appeals to our intellects) to the emotional truth where a deeper connection within ourselves makes permanent change possible.  Foer makes us realize that eating is central to who we are.  We are what we eat and eating compassionately changes our bodies as well as our souls.

Freedom (TM)

Freedom (TM), another high-tech thriller by Daniel Suarez, is the sequel to Daemon, which I read earlier this summer.  In Daemon, Matthew Sobol, a computer genius and video game designer, creates a program that goes into effect when triggered by his death.  The program (or daemon) manages to create nightmares of network security, kill a lot of people, pretty much bring down the infrastructure of society and take over the world.  It hacks the data of major corporations, banks and the government, manipulating people and institutions who must either do his bidding or...well, die. Sobol leaves video records that guide the investigation into his crimes.  At the end of Daemon, Sobol's motives are still not enitrely clear to the reader.  While he seems undoutedly sinister at the beginning of the book, by the end the reader is wondering if maybe he's not such a bad guy.  Does he have a larger plan for the world in mind?

In Freedom Sobol's motives are revealed.  Because the world has already been taken over by corrupt megacorporations who have bought government influence, Sobol's program is actually trying to do a good deed and win the world back for common humanity.  Unfortunately, the daemon does not shy away from violence, but uses it to his advantage, creating gruesome bloodbaths in a number of places. (According to my sources, this is a play on video game violence.)  In fact, the ending of Daemon was so ridiculously violent that I almost didn't read Freedom.  Well, I thought about not reading it, but you know how inquiring minds are.  They have to know and I had to know what Matt Sobol's grand plan actually was.

Some of Suarez's best writing is in the sections in which he fictionalizes technology.  A lot of the action actually occurs in a video game-like setting.  Sobol creates an alternate web called the "dark net" which has its own economy and is governed by the daemon's logic and by popular vote.  A character in the game (meaning any member of the dark net) can click on another character's icon and get all sorts of personal data, as well as a matrix of their connections to other characters.  Imagine someone being able to click on your head and having access to anything you've done on a computer ever -- and your email contacts and Facebook friends list. This easy access to information as well as the fact that almost everything is vidoe taped creates a kind of transparency that is weird, but interesting to imagine.

At times Suaraz's writing degenerates into the didactic.  I don't like it when a fiction writer tries to teach a lesson.  Of course, all good fiction writers do this, but the lesson should be so suble that the reader is unaware of being taught.  Suarez is at his worst when writing about farmers and their victimization by a megacorporation that is taking over their farmland, patenting seeds, planting only one crop and basically running them out of business.  One of the characters (a farmer's daughter) has to convince her father to join the dark net to fight this company. She teaches us about Monsanto's (not the name Suarez uses in the book) escapades in the Midwest in a thinly veiled lecture on the evils of industrial farming.  

By far the creepiest thing about this book is how true it is.  Reading it during the Gulf Oil Disaster, I was already wondering why BP seemed to be in charge of the clean up rather than the regulatory agencies of the government.  Then the stories of sex and drug parties for MMS employees came out.   And now the $10 million tax write off for BP.  And what about Ken Salazar's relationships to the oil industry? What about all those government subsidies to the oil industry ( depreciation tax write offs) and the hold that industry seems to have on congress?  Is does seem that people who speak up against them have paid a price.  The haunting question Freedom asks is this:  How true is Suarez's fiction?

Here is the first in a six-part interview with Suarez on "What the Tech?" in which he talks about the technology behind his fiction, how he wrote the book and marketed it.  Interestingly, he self-published the book before it was picked up by a mainstream publisher.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Jonathan Safran Foer says he lived in the brain of Oskar Schell for two and a half years to write this book.  Oskar Schell is the quirky, nine-year-old protagonist of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Foer's second novel.  Foer interweaves stories of personal trauma, family history and international tragedy to acheive insight into love, loss and the search for meaning.  One of the first post 9/11 novels published, the book has been widely acclaimed.

No one writes characters quite like Foer does.  Where most writers stop, Foer pushes a little further, delving deeper into the psyche of his subjects, adding details and description, thoughts and feelings that breathe life into his pages.  Oskar, for instance, is a precocious child, raised by progressive parents on the Upper East Side of New York City.  He  is mulitlingual, a pacifist,  a vegan and an amateur astrophysicist. Oskar is also lost in a sea of grief at his father's death. It is through Foer's portrayal of Oskar's remarkable intelligence that his pain becomes palpable for the reader.  Oskar's intense and questioning mind needs answers.  When he finds a key in his father's closet, his story takes on the dimensions of a quest as he searches to find the lock the key opens. And like most quests, it does't lead Oskar where he thinks it will.


Oskar's story is interwoven through parallel narratives with those of his grandparents, survivors of Nazi occupied Dresden.  Each narrative has a distinct style and vocabulary and each character has a personal story to tell.  The stories are tied together by a shared history and the impact of a single, horrible event on the course of a human life.


Foer also uses "postmodern" technique to take the book beyond the conventional format of a novel.  He includes photographs, handwritten notes, codes and script written over script to convey his messages. 

This is the first of three books I will read by Jonathan Safran Foer.  Next I'm reading Eating Animals which is a nonfiction book he wrote after he and his wife had a baby.  He wanted to know more about how to feed his child.  In it he explores not only the way our food is produced, but the culture of eating and our various attachments to food.  After that I'm reading Everything is Illuminated, which is supposed to be hilariously funny, but in a dark way.  I've already seen the movei and it was excellent. I love his writing and look forward to reading more of his work.