Micro Mention "Their Eyes Were Watching God"

Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God" is one of those novels written in such a keenly beautiful way that everything you want to express about how good it is—feels trite. What I can say is it was eye-opening for me.

In my full review of this novel, I finish by talking about its prominent religious themes, but apart from that, I think its humanity is what made it so touching to me. That is the true magic of stories to me. If you're open to it, you can experience a whole new world, a way of thinking and being, completely separate from your own. Hurston's writing makes it so easy to see the world through Janie's eyes.

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Micro Mention "Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant"

So, soon after starting Chernow's excellent biography, I decided that I wanted to get the story of Ulysses S. Grant straight from the man himself. "The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant" are startlingly intimate and powerful, and every American should read them. 

Anyway, fun fact, the "S" in Ulysses S. Grant doesn't stand for anything. It certainly doesn't stand for Simpson, making it weird that this audiobook edition proudly displays it as his full name. How do I know this? I read Chernow's book. In fact, his name was actually Hiram Ulysses Grant, but he went by his middle name. When he was accepted to West Point, the military academy dubbed him U. S. Grant through a clerical error.

Also, of all weird things, the terrible movie "Wild Wild West" gets it right that President Grant went to West Point when Will Smith's character realizes that he's talking to Kevin Kline's character in disguise by noticing him wearing the wrong school ring. Quite a clever moment for an otherwise stupid movie. Of course, it loses all cleverness points because earlier in the scene, Kline's master of disguise character costumed as Grant offers Smith's character whiskey. Grant was incredibly sensitive about his drinking and the perception that he was an alcoholic. As president, he would have never been caught dead drinking in front of anyone in the White House.

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Micro Mention "Grant"

"Grant" by Ron Chernow hasn't just made me a fan of Chernow as a historian but has made Ulysses S. Grant my favorite American president in history. Honestly, even if you read no other nonfiction/history book this year, you should read "Grant."

History is important. It tells where we've been, what we've done, and what we should have done. I don't respect opinions about policy and governance when the source of those opinions is ignorant about historical facts. That's my biggest problem with today's armchair politicians and, frankly, actual politicians. We've somehow swept back to the idea of loyalty to the individual over loyalty to the republic, and it absolutely boils my blood.

I talk about this book in greater detail in my full review here. 

The last point I want to make here in this piece is, so far as I'm aware of, Ulysses S. Grant, like George Washington, is the last great American president called to the presidency and did not seek it on his own initiative. We've lost this quality in our modern politics, and we are poorer for it.

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Author's Website: https://ronchernow.com/

Micro Mention "Up From Slavery"

"Up From Slavery" is one of those historical books, first published at the turn of the last century, that everyone should read at some point. The life and accomplishments of Booker T Washington are best first introduced in the man's own words.

The man had an optimistic view of the future for himself and his people in America, during a time where there was precious little to go on to vindicate him on that point. Still, there is something admirable about such stalwart optimism. Certainly, there are charges leveled against Booker T. Washington that he was more than a little bit naive, but I think that's an oversimplification of the man. After reading his book, I think he knew there were many challenges ahead, heartaches, and struggles, and maybe the work doesn't get done in a single generation—or ten. In the end, though, like any true American, he knew that our strength has never been through division but in unity.

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"Their Eyes Were Watching God" by Zora Neale Hurston--Fiction Review

Hello, my obscurists. In today’s review, we’re going to head into the deep south in the post-reconstruction era, with Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” It’s a story of loss and love, but most of all, it’s a book about what a life well-lived looks like despite all opposition.

***The Non-Spoiler part of this review***

What I love about this book:

Usually, I’m a “narrative is king” sort of person, but to read “Their Eyes Were Watching God” and not note how absolutely gorgeous Hurston’s prose is—would be a disservice. There is a pastoral, naturalistic quality to it that her metaphors are all grounded in. Her use of regional dialect might be off-putting to some people, but I found that it enhanced the story for me. Her words described the world her characters lived in, and their words, and the language they used, told who they were and what it was like to live in that world.

The three men in Janie’s life that were her husbands at various points in her life are interesting contrasts of each other. They each represent a different mode of life for black men of their era. And while their “works,” or the lack of them in Tea Cake’s case, in some sense, defined them, they were also capable of surprising acts outside of their usual character, which means they never fall into becoming flat stereotypes.

Janie herself is a heroic character—a black woman, born into a world only a few scant generations after the American Civil War—finding her voice and achieving agency for herself in of itself was a radical idea for her era. That’s how oppressive her world was—that the very idea that she could have wants and dreams, hopes and goals, of her own, wasn’t even considered. The fact that it takes her the better part of the story to finally stand up for her belief that she, Janie, was a person with thoughts and feelings just as valid as anyone else doesn’t diminish her heroism. It’s still an achievement when she stands up for herself, her gender, and her race—even when sometimes those three elements weren’t necessarily aligned.

What I don’t love about this book:

There are many side characters in this book that can be described as people who should just mind their own business. They’re constantly insinuating themselves into Janie’s life, typically just picking at her and expressing disapproval for some such or other. As someone who grew up in a small-town setting, I can confirm wholeheartedly this is definitely authentic small-town behavior. My dislike for this kind of behavior, in reality, translates right into fiction, and I was often annoyed by some petty character or another whose whole role in life seems to be to give Janie a hard time. I get their function within the story and why they’re there, but I did find myself thinking several times, did there really need to be so many of them?

I’ve mentioned that I’m a big dog lover before on this blog—so it was horribly troubling for me that the ultimate antagonist of this story, other than the hurricane, was a rabid dog. The thing is, I saw it coming too, and when the dog bit someone, I knew exactly what the problem was going to be after that. All of that was very sad for the humans involved, don’t get me wrong, it works, but me being me, I was still going on about how sad I was about the dog in my head. So I was distracted by that.

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***The Spoiler part of this review***

***Ye be warned to turn back now***

The quick and dirty synopsis:

The story starts with a frame story of Janie returning home after a long day and not engaging with her gossiping neighbors, who proceed to talk about her—unkindly. Janie’s friend, however, excuses herself and walks over to Janie’s house to give her some food, and ultimately the conversation turns to the story of Janie’s life.

"Grant," by Ron Chernow--Nonfiction Review

In today’s nonfiction review, we’re talking about General, and President Ulysses S. Grant, in Ron Chernow’s biography “Grant.” Ulysses S. Grant may have had his problems when he resided in the white house—because he wasn’t a natural-born politician—but due to the sum total of his life, he’s become my favorite historical American President.

What I love about this book:

I love how comprehensive Chernow is with this biography. He gives us warts and all of Ulysses S. Grant, what made him a great leader, and what his blind spots were. Grant was an incredibly honorable man who always sought to do what he promised and intended to do and couldn’t conceive that the people closest to him wouldn’t necessarily give the same effort. Chernow highlights that this was even a problem during Grant’s incredible military career during the Civil war, but it was a veritable Achilles heel during his presidency.

It was fascinating to discover how Grant thought and what his skills and weaknesses were in life, and even more so than his own memoirs, I feel like “Grant,” the biography is the closest thing we can get to reading his mind. General Sherman put it best that Grant was a unique intermingling of strength and weakness and that he was a mystery—even to himself. 

This is a biography from birth to death which gives us a complete picture of the subject. A thing I loved about the man—that Chernow’s biography taught me—is that Grant had experienced failure multiple times in his life but constantly reinvented himself to meet the current challenges of his life. He started as a shy boy who loved horses who would one day rise to the highest possible military rank, and hero of the republic, then President of the United States, a world traveler, and finally, a best-selling author posthumously.

The quality that General Grant possessed that I think I admire the most about him—and I feel is lacking in politicians today—was his ability to recognize when he was wrong and change his mind about things. He was the son of an abolitionist, but as a young man, he was noncommittal on the subject of abolishing slavery. He even once owned a slave, given to him by his father-in-law. But, over the course of his life, he freed his one slave, and during his military career and as President, he evolved as a person and became an ardent defender of equal rights. Grant, as President, even uncharacteristically passionately railed against southern atrocities where black men and women were murdered in orgiastic periodic paroxysms of death, sanctioned tacitly by southern officials.

What I don’t love about this book:

As a biography, “Grant” is amazing, and there isn’t much I can talk about that I didn’t like about it. It can be accused of being a bit long, but I forgive that because the subject matter is so interesting to me. My old nemesis of super-long chapters raises its head in this book, but I get why Chernow wrote them this way.

Mainly, I can talk about what I didn’t like about the subject of the biography, General Grant himself. Ulysses S. Grant became a personal hero of mine as I read this biography and his own memoirs, and it always hurts the most when your heroes fail to live up to your expectations, falter, and show their human failings. I’m not one to attack Grant for his drinking problem—and he was undoubtedly an alcoholic—many a “lost causer” have already beat that point to death, and I don’t respect them as people or historians. The two things that hurt the most for me were reading about General Order No. 11—a frankly racist order that is ironic when you consider the war’s aims—that targeted exclusively Jewish people, and how Grant wasn’t there for John Rawlins when he died. It broke my heart how after Rawlins served Grant so faithfully during the war, and how important loyalty was to Grant, that he barely mentioned him in his memoirs and when Rawlins lay dying, Sherman had to lie to him, telling him Grant would be there soon—just five more minutes—when he knew Grant couldn’t possibly make the journey in time.

I know I said above that I like complete biographies—but one of the terrible side effects of reading one is that when you find yourself genuinely admiring the person the biography is about, you start dreading the end. After all, the hero always dies at the end of a biography of their entire life. At several points in the last third of the book, I started slowing down because I knew from other sources than this book, primarily from a docudrama of the same name, that the end of Grant’s life was awful. Despite being the hero of the union—the man in the field who ultimately made it possible to save America—Grant died nearly destitute, writing his memoirs while dying in agony from throat cancer to save his family from poverty.

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Author's Website: https://ronchernow.com/

Parting thoughts:

This book reminded me that we have a long, shameful history of forgetting our heroes here in America. As you might imagine from above, I’m not too keen on “the lost cause” historical theory of the American Civil war, which recasts General Lee as a hero and General Grant as a bumbling idiot and butcher.

I’m also currently reading a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Again, we let something like McCarthyism destroy a man who—for better or worse—changed the course of human destiny, giving us the ability to control nuclear power.

On a far less controversial note than the father of the atomic bomb, the first responders of nine-eleven didn’t get a guarantee from these United States that their healthcare would be paid for in perpetuity until 2019. Nine-Eleven happened in 2001, by the way. We thanked them for their courage and bravery during the worst terrorist attack in modern American history, and then—for nearly twenty years after—we started hem hawing away about cost. In the wealthiest country in the world, as our literal living heroes began dying of cancer which tore their lungs and other organs apart—cancer they got saving lives in the ruins of the twin towers—congress wanted to have a serious discussion about nickels and dimes.

Even after they had to be shamed into doing the right thing as a group, two senators, Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky, still voted against it. Literally and unequivocally stating that dollars are more important than human lives—even heroes. Mitch McConnell, also from Kentucky, who I do not like for numerous reasons, wasn’t even so callous as that. Both Lee and Paul claim to be upstanding members of the party of Lincoln and Grant—and oh—how far the GOP has come.