The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich (Evening Edition book club)
The Night Watchman is based on Louise Erdrich's grandfather's life. In 1953 Thomas Wazhashk is working as the night watchman at the jewel-bearing plant on the Turtle Mountain Reservation for Chippewa Indians. He is also a Chippewa council member. When he finds out about a proposed bill that would "emancipate" all Indians from any US Government benefits, including the land of their reservation, he knows he must try to stop it. Using all his resources Thomas brings together all the people on his reservation to fight back. Meanwhile, Patrice "Pixie" Paranteau has been working at the jewel plant since graduating high school to help support her family. Her older sister Vera moved away to Minneapolis for work, but has disappeared. Patrice decides to find out what happened to her and try to bring her back home.
While the storyline of this book sounds super interesting and brings to light even more of our historical marginalization of Native Americans, I found the book to be EXTREMELY slow. There were so many characters and side stories, but sometimes they didn't really add to the overall story in my opinion. I also felt like the book ended abruptly without much explanation or closure on the two main storylines. You never really find out what happened to Vera - it's implied and vague, but I would have liked a few chapters from her at the end. As for the proposed bill it doesn't go through, but that also wasn't really explained other than a brief page at the very end of the book. It felt like this book was pulled from a much larger, longer book and left out some important chapters at the end. There were some really odd parts too - like WHY did Patrice do the woodjack thing? Was she just so desperate for the money? That was one of the oddest parts of the book. Overall, there were parts I liked, but it was WAY too long and too vague of an ending for me to recommend this one. I'll be curious to see what my book club thinks of this one.
Some quotes I liked:
"Arthur V. Watkins grew up on some of this land, which had been stolen by his father...Joseph Smith and the early Mormons had tried their best to murder all the Indians in their path across the country, but in the end did not quite succeed. Arthur V. Watkins decided to use the power of his office to finish what the prophet had started. He didn't even have to get his hands bloody." (p. 185-86)
"Eddy Mink: The services that the government provides to Indians might be likened to rent. The rent for the use of the entire country of the United States. The officials in the front of the room looked a little stunned by Eddy's statement." (p. 201)
Say Grace: how the restaurant business saved my life by Steve Palmer
Steve Palmer had a great early childhood. He and his sister were adopted by their parents - a doctor and nurse who loved them and were happy. But, when Steve was six his Dad developed a series of serious health issues related to type-1 diabetes. He died when Steve was ten, then almost exactly a year later Steve's grandfather died of lung cancer. Steve's mom just shut down and wasn't there emotionally for her kids at all. That was when Steve started drinking. Because of his deteriorating relationship with his mother, he was homeless at sixteen. Eventually when he was nineteen he moved in with his sister and her husband and started working in a restaurant. In restaurants Steve found the family he had always wanted - people who accepted him as he was and helped him progress in the restaurant industry. But, the restaurant industry is also full of alcohol, drugs, and addicts. It's normal to go out after service and get drunk every night. It's normal to do cocaine during service to keep up with a busy night. These norms allowed Steve to work for a decade while also being a serious drug addict and alcoholic. Eventually when he was 32 his wife left him and the owners of the restaurant he was working in staged an intervention and paid for him to go to treatment. That was when he finally got sober. But, coming back to work was terrifying because he knew he would be around alcohol at work. It was hard and he did lose friends, but he found a community of sober people within the restaurant industry who helped him stay sober while still working in this field. Steve eventually opened his own hospitality group that helped open restaurants. After losing a friend who was the chef at one of Steve's restaurants to suicide, Steve and another friend started Ben's Friends, a food industry support group for people struggling with addiction or mental illness. Ben's Friends has grown and now have chapters all over the US. For Steve the food industry saved him when he was homeless and then again when his addiction was ruining his life, so to be able to give back and make that industry better is his goal. Addiction and mental illness aren't as taboo now, but there is still a long way to go especially in the restaurant and food industry. This is a short, but powerful and timely memoir of the power of food, addiction, and recovery.
Fear Gone Wild: a story of mental illness, suicide, and hope through loss by Kayla Stoecklein
Kayla Stoecklein seemed to have it all - a loving husband who was the head pastor of their church, three boys, and a lovely home. But, when her husband started suffering from debilitating depression and anxiety her whole world changed. She tried everything she could to help her husband, but she was also trying to parent their children and run their household as well. After taking a leave of absence from their church, her husband tried to rest and reset. But, shortly after starting the process of coming back into his role at their church he died by suicide. Kayla was shocked and destroyed. She was a widow at age 29 with three children. But, with her family and her faith Kayla survived her husband's death and worked to create a new path for herself and her children.
Mental health and suicide are seldom discussed in the Church. That is one of the main reasons Kayla wanted to tell her story. Christians aren't immune from these issues, but often Christians don't know what to do when someone is really struggling in these areas. Some Christians think suicide means a person can't go to heaven so that makes it an even more taboo topic - especially for someone who is struggling in that area to talk about. While, I think these are important issues for the Church to address, I didn't think this book did a great job of it. Kayla didn't really talk about HOW churches can help address these topics/areas better. I also felt like her husband's issues didn't suddenly pop up, it seemed like it had been going on for probably their whole relationship, but got to the point where he couldn't hide it anymore. She did talk about the things she realized in hind sight she could have done better. And I liked that she included a chapter at the end called "Find Hope" with resources for people struggling with mental illness or suicidal thoughts. Overall, I don't want to be critical of her story but I didn't find this book to be very helpful. Maybe it's more helpful for someone who lost a family member to suicide or to someone who is currently struggling.
The Jemima Code: two centuries of African American cookbooks by Toni Tipton-Martin
The Jemima Code is a very unique book. Toni Tipton-Martin was working as a food writer and editor for newspapers when she started to wonder where were all the African-American cookbooks. She started researching and buying rare African-American cookbooks and following themes she could see from different time periods of publications. Her years of study and collecting culminate in this unique book. While at first glance of the cover it looks like it may be a cookbook, but really it's more like an extensive bibliography or pathfinder. Each section covers a time period and has a detailed review of the cookbooks (or some of them) published in that time. You can clearly see changes in covers and style over the years in how the authors and content are portrayed. I could also see the temptation to just flip through a book like this, but I do feel it's worth the time to read each chapter's introduction and Tipton-Martin's reviews of the cookbooks. Overall, a very unique book that highlights an often overlooked part of our culinary history.
I love this quote at the end of the book and really feel like it highlights Tipton-Martin's point:
"I know that we can not take back three hundred years of harsh words and pictures, but I believe it is possible to undo some of the damage just by looking at the vast diversity of talents and abilities displayed by African American food professionals through the cookbooks they left behind. And thereby see ourselves." (p. 222)
Pretty Bitches: on being called crazy, angry, bossy, frumpy, feisty, and all the other words that are used to undermine women by Lizzie Skurnick, ed.
Pretty Bitches is a collection of essays from well-known authors about all the words used to undermine women. Some may not be obvious like "too," "lucky," or "disciplined" while others like "ugly," "shrill," or "crazy" are obvious, although still not to everyone. Overall, it was a great collection of essays. I genuinely liked most of them, which can be rare in a compilation like this. Definitely worth adding to your feminist reading list.
Some quotes I liked:
"But the reality, I realized as I wrestled with this possibility, is that white men are rarely told they possess too much of anything. That all the things women do too much of - talk, think, desire, aspire, smile, yell, take up space - we cannot get enough of in men." (p. xxii-xxiii)
"She's nice. That's a compliment. She's too nice. That means she's not tough enough, not single-minded or a go-getter, not someone who can successfully manage people, build a business, be relied upon, make money. When was the last time you heard someone say a man was too nice? Um, probably never." (p. 4)
"In a sense it's the perfect double-edged sword: you're shrill if you try to speak too soon, and you're also shrill if you have earned the right to speak. Shrill is much less about what the speaker is saying, as it turns out, and more about the listener's capacity to cede ground. Shrill, in other words, is the word people use to signal they aren't ready to listen - not to your voice, but to what you're actually saying." (p. 48-9)
"Yet the tone of her remark suggested there'd been a random draw, and I'd pulled the right card and she the wrong one. As if neither of us had had a hand in creating our own lives - ones filled with challenges, joys, and hardships - and that mine let me do decadent things like get massages. Unearned" (p. 58)
Home Baked: my mom, marijuana, and the stoning of San Francisco by Alia Volz
Meridy Volz was a hippie and artist who moved West to San Francisco like many like-minded young people in the 1970's. She had discovered pot and other drugs in college and it was even easier to find access to anything and everything in San Francisco. Meridy met a friend who was selling baked goods, including pot brownies. When that friend offered her the brownie business - Sticky Fingers Brownies was born. But, Meridy was hopeless in the kitchen so she roped in two friends to help with the baking. Eventually she met and married Doug Volz who also helped run the business and they kept the business going even after having their daughter Alia. Meridy and Sticky Fingers Brownies lived through several historic events - Jonestown and the People's Temple, the assassination of Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, and the advent of the AIDS epidemic. It was the AIDS epidemic that hit everyone in San Francisco the hardest. Many people, including Meridy, lost dozens of friends often very quickly. But, as she knew her pot brownies could provide some relief and that paved the way for medical marijuana reform and other legislation still going on today. Alia tells her mother's unique story which is also her family story as both her parents ran the business together until their divorce. Alia's father eventually got a "straight" job, but Meridy continued to live as an artist. However, she did give up drug dealing after twenty-two years. Throughout Meridy's story is the story of marijuana in America and how political this simple drug was and still is. It's infuriating to read about all the data behind medicinal use of marijuana continually be disregarded by both medical and political leaders in order to continue the war on drugs and the current pharmaceutical industry. Definitely a unique book about a very unique woman and her special brownie business.
Some quotes I liked:
"In 1971, the War on Drugs officially began...Months before, Congress had ratified the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 as part of a massive omnibus bill. Buried among its pages were major curtailments to civil rights. Narcotics agents could now conduct no-knock raids (breaking down doors unannounced); preventative detention became and option for arresting suspects before they committed a drug crime; and witnesses could be jailed indefinitely for refusing to testify in drug cases. The new legislation created a scheduling system that ranked drugs according to their health risks, addictiveness, and medicinal value...With this investigation pending, marijuana was temporarily placed in Schedule 1 - the category reserved for drugs with the highest abuse potential and no accepted medical use...[Raymond] Shafer, a law-and-0rder man, [who chaired the committee Nixon created] had been shocked to learn that the facts about cannabis didn't support the rhetoric. The report, Marihuana: A Signal of Misunderstanding, described a substance that caused neither physical addiction nor a marked tendency to graduate to harder drugs nor the violent behavior depicted in antipot propaganda nor serious damage to the body or brain. The danger, the report concluded, was political, stemming from the perception of marijuana as 'fostering a counter-culture that conflicts with basic moral precepts.' The commission asked if criminal punishment for cannabis might be causing more harm to society than the drug itself...Nixon allegedly refused to read beyond the first few pages. His administration buried the report and continued its alarmist rhetoric." (p. 16-17)
"The Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 expanded antiracketeering laws that allowed the government to confiscate property used in committing a federal crime - and auction it for revenue...Astoundingly, law enforcement didn't need proof of criminal activity to confiscate property; they didn't even have to file charges. They could now take everything simply by asserting 'probable cause'...Even when the accused was later found not guilty, the legislation offered no roadmap for reclaiming what the government grabbed. In a searing 1991 expose based on a review of 25,000 seizures nationwide, the Pittsburgh Press reported that 80 percent of the people whose property taken were never even charged with a crime." (p. 329)
"Drug arrests doubled during Reagan's tenure. Defense attorneys in drug cases were soon required to report any fees received in cash as well as payments exceeding $10,000. The federal government could then seize those assets and destroy the attorney-client relationship...This was the dawn of mass incarceration, which today imprisons nearly 2.3 million people in the United States." (p. 330-31)
"Even with the mode of transmission [of AIDS] understood, confusion and paranoia persisted...In 1985, the New York Times reported that 51 percent of survey respondents supported quarantining AIDS patients, 48 percent supported issuing identity cards, and 15 percent thought that people with HIV should be forcibly tattooed." (p. 334)
"In 1976, a glaucoma patient named Robert Randall smoked a joint with friends and discovered, quite by accident, that marijuana eased the ocular pressure that was blinding him at twenty-five. He soon got busted for growing four plants for personal use...He decided to base his case on medical necessity, a defense that had never been used successfully. Realizing that even if he won in court he'd just get busted again, Randall audaciously petitioned the government to supply his weed from its own experimental farm...Amazingly, Randall's strategy worked; the government provided him with ten joints per day for the rest of his life. Randall's case forced the FDA to create the Compassionate Investigational New Drug program to supply legal pot to people who could prove medical necessity...But they kept the program quiet..." (p. 350) [when a couple in Florida who both had AIDS used the same program to justify their need for medical marijuana and won in 1991, President Bush shut the Compassionate IND program down. p. 380]
