Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, and audio books.  You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.

“I was leaving the South
to fling myself into the unknown . . .
I was taking a part of the South
to transplant in alien soil,
to see if it could grow differently,
if it could drink of new and cool rains,
bend in strange winds,
respond to the warmth of other suns
and, perhaps, to bloom”

― Richard Wright

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

by Isabel Wilkerson

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/warmth-of-other-suns-isabel-wilkerson/1100082345?ean=9780679763888

In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life.

I have been reading this story since the first of January thanks to maggiejean who sent me a copy.  It is a hefty book, but it reads easily.  The real people speak to my heart and I care about them.  The time period covered is wide, from the end of WW I to the 70’s.

The result is a warmly human and also heart-breaking account of why the people migrated and what they were hoping to find.  This is an important story as well as an eye-opening one.  It is inspiring as well.  

The difficulties the people encountered in the Great Migration in both trying to leave the South and after their arrival in the North or West are many and horrifying.  The lack of homes, the packing of so many into a small area, and the lack of jobs all testify to the courage they had in making the attempt.  

Pg. 163

When the people kept leaving, the South resorted to coercion and interception worthy of the Soviet Union, which was forming at the same time across the Atlantic.  Those trying to leave were rendered fugitives by definition and could not be certain they would be able to make it out.  In Brookhaven, Mississippi, authorities stopped a train with fifty colored migrants on it and sidetracked it for three days.  In Albany, Georgia, the police tore up the tickets of colored passengers as they stood waiting to board, dashing their hopes of escape.

A minister in South Carolina, having seen his parishioners off, was arrested at the station on the charge of helping colored people get out.  In Savannah, Georgia, the police arrested every colored person at the station regardless of where he or she was going.  In Summit, Mississippi, authorities simply closed the ticket office and did not let northbound trains stop for the colored people waiting to get on.

Instead of stemming the tide, the blockades and arrests “served to intensify the desire to leave,” wrote the sociologists Willis T. Weatherford and Charles S. Johnson, “and to provide further reasons for going.”

Pg. 367

“Even in the North, refugees were not always safe,” wrote Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy in the 1945 book Anyplace but Here.  “One hard-working migrant was astonished when a detective from Atlanta approached him and informed him that he was wanted back home for ‘spitting on the sidewalk.’”

Wiki says:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Warmth_of_Other_Suns

… The book intertwines a general history and statistical analysis of the entire period. It includes the biographies of three persons: a sharecropper's wife who left Mississippi in the 1930s for Chicago, named Ida Mae Brandon Gladney; an agricultural worker, George Swanson Starling, who left Florida for New York City in the 1940s; and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, a doctor who left Louisiana in the early 1950s, moving to Los Angeles.

About the author Isabel Wilkerson:

http://isabelwilkerson.com/

Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson devoted 15 years to the research and writing of The Warmth of Other Suns. She interviewed more than 1,200 people, unearthed archival works and gathered the voices of the famous and the unknown to tell the epic story of the Great Migration, one of the biggest under-reported stories of the 20th Century and one of the largest migrations in American history…

Isabel Wilkerson in her Notes on Methodology in writing The Warmth of Other Suns says:

Pg. 540

…as most studies of the Migration focused on the important questions of demographics, politics, economics, and sociology, I wanted to convey the intimate stories of people who had dared to make the crossing.  I wanted to capture the vastness of the phenomenon by tracking unrelated people who had followed the multiple streams of the Great Migration over the course of the decades it unfolded.  I wanted to reach as many as I could of this dwindling generation in the spirit of the oral history projects with the last surviving slaves back in the 1930’s…

The book is essentially three projects in one.  The first was a collection of oral histories from around the country.  The second was the distillation of those oral histories into a narrative of three protagonists, each of whom led a sufficiently full life to merit a book in his or her own right and was thus researched and reported as such.  

The third was an examination of newspaper accounts and scholarly and literary works of the era and more recent analyses of the Migration to recount the motivations, circumstances, and  perceptions of the Migration as it was in progress and to put the subject’s actions into historical context.

Pg. 541

The seeds of this project were sown within me years ago, growing up with parents who had migrated from the South…

I have also been reading Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly which goes really well with Warmth.  It tells much of the same story about discrimination and how people escaped it.  One lady kept removing the demeaning “colored table” sign from the lunch table every day.  Another one ignored the white women only bathroom sign and used it anyway.  Pettiness for the ladies whose work was so important.  Shameful.

Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/hidden-figures-margot-lee-shetterly/1123655109?ean=9780062363602

Set against the backdrop of the Jim Crow South and the civil rights movement, the never-before-told true story of NASA’s African-American female mathematicians who played a crucial role in America’s space program—and whose contributions have been unheralded, until now.

Before John Glenn orbited the Earth or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of professionals worked as “Human Computers,” calculating the flight paths that would enable these historic achievements. Among these were a coterie of bright, talented African-American women. Segregated from their white counterparts by Jim Crow laws, these “colored computers,” as they were known, used slide rules, adding machines, and pencil and paper to support America’s fledgling aeronautics industry, and helped write the equations that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space.

Drawing on the oral histories of scores of these “computers,” personal recollections, interviews with NASA executives and engineers, archival documents, correspondence, and reporting from the era, Hidden Figures recalls America’s greatest adventure and NASA’s groundbreaking successes through the experiences of five spunky, courageous, intelligent, determined, and patriotic women: Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, Christine Darden, and Gloria Champine.

Moving from World War II through NASA’s golden age, touching on the civil rights era, the Space Race, the Cold War, and the women’s rights movement, Hidden Figures interweaves a rich history of scientific achievement and technological innovation with the intimate stories of five women whose work forever changed the world—and whose lives show how out of one of America’s most painful histories came one of its proudest moments.

Pg. 167

The progress that the black women had made in the last fourteen years was unmistakable.  Demand for their mathematical abilities had opened Langley’s front door to them and the quality of their work had kept them at their desks.  Through the familiarity that came with regular contact, they had been able to establish themselves not as “the colored girls” but simply “the girls,” the ones engineers relied upon to swiftly and accurately translate the raw babble of the laboratory’s fierce machines into a language that could be analyzed and turned into a vehicle that cut through the sky with grace and power.

Pgs. 181, 182

But the average level of interest in the work among female employees was no lower than it was for their male counterparts…They matched their male colleagues in curiosity, passion, and the ability to withstand pressure.  Their path to advancement might look less like a straight line and more like some of the pressure distributions and orbits they plotted, but they were determined to take a seat at the table.

First, however, they had to get over the high hurdle of low expectations.

…”Why can’t I go to the editorial meetings?” Katherine Goble asked again, undeterred by the initial demurral…The greatest adventure in the history of humankind was happening two desks away, and it would be a betrayal of her own self-confidence and of the judgment of everyone who had helped her to reach this point to not go the final distance.  She asked early, she asked often, and she asked penetrating questions about the work.  She asked with the highest respect for the natures of the brainy fellas she worked with, and she asked knowing that she was the right person for a task that needed the finest minds.

As much as anything, she asked with confidence in the ultimate decision.

“Let her go,” they finally said, exasperated.  The engineers just got tired of saying no.  

Landing men on the moon was also in capable hands.

Pg. 233

Two vehicles and 238,900 miles: three days there and three days back. Twenty-one hours on the surface of the Moon for two astronauts in the lunar lander, while the service module circled the heavenly body in a parking orbit.  Katherine (Johnson) knew better than anyone that if the trajectory of the parked service module was even slightly off, when the astronauts ended their lunar exploration and piloted their space buggy back up from the Moon’s surface, the two vehicles might not meet up.  

The command service module was the astronauts’ bus-their only bus-back to Earth: the lander would ferry the astronauts to the waiting service module and then be discarded.  If the two vehicles’ orbits didn’t coincide, the two in the lander would be stranded forever in the vacuum of space.  

Pg. 248

Katherine considers her work on the lunar rendezvous, prescribing the precise time at which the lunar lander needed to leave the Moon’s surface in order to coincide and dock with the orbiting command service module, to be her greatest contribution to the space program.  

Pgs. 249, 250

Her contributions to the space program’s signature epoch earned her NASA Group Achievement Awards for project Apollo and the Lunar Orbiter Project.  She has received three honorary doctorates and a citation from the state of Virginia…In 2015, President Obama awarded Katherine Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom…

Here is an excellent and interesting comparison of the movie and the book:

Hidden Figures

http://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/hidden-figures/

I also discovered this book that I ordered for my granddaughter (It has pictures):

Hidden Figures Young Readers' Edition

by Margot Lee Shetterly

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/hidden-figures-young-readers-edition-margot-lee-shetterly/1124016162?ean=9780062662378

… Before John Glenn orbited the earth, or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as “human computers” used pencils, slide rules, and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space.

This book brings to life the stories of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden, four African-American women who lived through the civil rights era, the Space Race, the Cold War, and the movement for gender equality, and whose work forever changed the face of NASA and the country.

I just finished reading the graphic books, March, a trilogy by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, Nate Powell.  Also, heart-rending and inspiring. 

Another important book is:

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist

A list of many other African American authors is here:

Bookflurries-Bookchat: Exploring a World of Authors

www.dailykos.com/…

Diaries of the Week:

Write On! So who's the narrator?

By SensibleShoes

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/2/16/1634587/-Write-On-So-who-s-the-narrator#view-story

……………..

Introducing the New Kos Katalogue!

By Avilyn

www.dailykos.com/...

………………..

Bessie Coleman: Persisting into the Skies

By BlackSheep1

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/02/18/1632107/-Bessie-Coleman-Persisting-into-the-Skies

……………………

Black History Month – Funky Parade Part III

By MT Spaces

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/02/18/1635355/-Black-History-Month-Funky-Parade-Part-III#comment_65569038

……………….

All Times are EDT, EST

In WAYR?, I note what I’m reading and comment...you note what you are reading and comment. Occasionally, I may add a section or a link related to books.

Every book on my list this week is set in France.

Poppa Passes: for A. Ginsberg​

Southbound train,       

under a comet. 

Thinking of you, 
     seraphic poppa. 
I was sick the night you died, 
     lying on a friend's floor, 
     hollow stomached, 
     bloody-eyed,  ear full of your words. 

Words of mystic Paterson,       

maniacal Manhattan. 
     Waves drowning the Battery, 
     Staten Island. 
     Engines crushing the streets of the Bronx. 
     Steam whistles shrieking the deathsong of cities. 
Words of the body, 
     temple of sensation. 
     Turbid glans, 
     ruby cap of May. 
     Youth's sexy masses 
     in Summer's bare-assed glory. 
Of America, 
     cold mother. 
     Delta of nations, 
     many tongued, many fingered. 
Words of Naomi, 
     Nipple of madness and vision, 
     liquid seed of your Buddhist, Jewboy accents.   

You had a lot to say       

to a blue jeaned, buzzcut boy,

       tongue thick with southern heat.   

I never got to tell you,       

about roads bled red, 
     pines ominous with rain. 
Melting fields, 
          where hundreds died in seconds, 
          thousands in minutes.  
Fields grown fat with grass,           

 children running barefoot over the dead.   

Not a word  about my brother and me, 
     pockets stuffed 
with imaginary minie’ balls and arrowheads. 
Barbecue scenes, 
     with hogs strung up for cutting up 
     and black fisted razors keeping time with eyes and teeth. 
No meat for the Synagogue. 
     The serious talk of salesmen, 
     trading salutes with bellies and cigars, 
     over sweet iced tea. 
     Labored breaths 
     of tractors, cultivators  and business coquetries.   

Now, forty-odd years later, 

a comet signals your exit.   

Cars stop.  Doors open. 
I mount the platform. 
The tiles run red. 
     Train pulls out, 
     rear light winking, 
     like an old man's eye

       or a cupped hand waving.

W.B. Reeves Copyright 2017

Homage to Peter Lorre

I see you Laszlo Lowenstein,
With your stoned out eyes and slouched hat.
Lurking on street corners.
Hiding out in the Hollywood Hills.

Behind you: Berlin.
A life lived on Europe’s fault line.
The theaters, studios and cabarets.
The narrow streets.
The sound of boots and drums in the night.

Before you the gold rush boulevards with streams of automobiles.
A witness to night and fog in a land of sunshine and earthquake.
A fatal shadow on the sound stage.
A marked man refracted in a million eyes.

Did you sense the rule of crime was coming?
The Justice of gangsters.
The Reason of fanatics.
Did you foresee all in the glint of a monocled eye?
Did you ever look over your shoulder and glimpse yourself,
Hunted and frightened?

And after all of the theatrics;
All the aping of evil,
Alarms and sirens,
Blast and smoke.
To find you’d only grazed the edge of an iceberg of blood.

After this, what comfort in survival?
Only the delight of children,
Fingers buttered by popcorn,
Bubbling laughter in the dark.

By such as these you’ve been preserved past death.

WB Reeves Copyright 2017

AFTERWARDS IN AMSTERDAM

“We are bags of shit that dream.”
That’s what the Dutchman said.

But he was a child of the occupation.
He and his pals stole schnapps and petrol from the Nazis.
They drank the schnapps,
Put petrol in the bottles
And returned them with interest.
So I’d say, he could say, whatever he chose.

The thought makes me think of Amsterdam,
Where I wandered between myself and you;

Down leafed canals,
Past points of  deportation.
Catching Anne Frank’s brazen gaze
Outside the tolling Westerkirk,
I kept an eye on the triangular headstones.

In a sensational haze the Slavic tongue murmured;
A river sound rising from the back of the throat,
Washing against the teeth.
-Had it only been hours ago
We parted in St. Petersburg?-
I’d crossed frontiers unpierced by red battalions since,
Trespassed imperial limits,
To discover Dutch courage.

Still, I recalled our day in Pushkin;
Inside the Catherine Gardens,
Outside the Moorish poet’s dacha,
Beside the stone engraved to the blood of Jews.
Your face as we listened to the violin and flute.

“We are bags of shit that dream.”
It’s what the Dutchman said
And I believed it true,
In that city on the lip of a cold sea,
Between blushed monuments,
Where two women on bicycles stopped by
And asked me if I understood
The meaning of the triangle.

WB Reeves Copyright 2017

A POET OF SMALL THINGS

Sometimes I think I'd like to be  a poet of small things.
Wringing epiphanies from a kitchen sponge.
Spying visions in the sheen of immaculate window panes.
Celebrating the rituals of cleansing.
The revelations of routine.
The plastic penance of scrub brushes.
The baptism of the bath tub ringed with unoriginal sins.

If I were a poet of small things,
I could measure out my life in inches along a yardstick of years.
Find infinity in a coffee cup.
Serenity in in a cinnamon bun,
  rounding out the day
  with languid bicycle rides.
Calm at the close
  with no thought of the impatient sun.

If I were a poet of small things
  I could discover,
    tragedy in a splinter.
 Detect pathos in a parking ticket.
 Grief in a raveled sleeve
    or a thread bare sock.
 Desire in a breath,
    close and heavy on the ear.
 The passion of the weathercock,
    abject in the impulsive wind

And if I were a poet of small things,
   a poet of simplicities,
I might recover
   the morality of the infant
   lolling at its mothers breast.

Caressed by memory
   I might uncover
   the mysteries of the nursery, the schoolyard
   and the toilet.
The deaths of dogs, cats and others.

Yes,
   sometimes I think it would be nice
   to be a poet of small things.

Then I recall:

   there are no small things,

   only small poets.

W.B. Reeves Copyright 2017

W.B. Reeves

Week in poetry:

CLASSIC POETRY GROUP.

CLASSIC POETRY for Feb. 14: "O let me true in love but truly write," Shakespeare's Sonnet 21

17th Century Poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz has a Message for Trump, McConnell and Republicans

*************

Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense:

The creative act  Kenneth Rexroth

*

Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, and audio books.  You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.

Hubby used to watch a garden show on PBS where every week they visited a wonderful garden and the host and the owner would walk through the garden pointing out all the different plants.

…………

I thought about my bookshelves as a book garden and how varied my “plants” are and I was happy about that.

I understand that some readers stick to one genre or to non-fiction books only.  That is fine, but I always try my best to tempt you to try another kind of book by showing you my garden.

I had a good friend many years ago who would go to the library with me.  (She also made me go to movies I might have passed by if not for her.  So she broadened me in many ways).  Each time we entered the library she would remind me loudly about what she considered to be the good books.  I was so intimidated that while she was in the stacks browsing, I would grab a Mary Stewart, run to the check out and ask them to check it out to me quick.  Then I would innocently put it in my book bag and look at other “good” books.

I had another friend who would give me a book once in a while because he never kept any of them.  None.  I was horrified.  I need my book garden.  I have re-read many of my books and I am planning on doing more of that this year. 

So a brief look at my garden.  I will name just a few “plants” as examples of each type.  I always hope that my lists will remind readers about their favorite books or get them to add some titles onto their wish list. 

Over here by the gate are my science books.  There are not very many of them, but they are cherished. 

Books by Brian Greene who explains hard things so well.  I don’t understand a lot of it, but I am eager to learn what I can. 

    Elegant Universe

    Fabric of the Cosmos

Some by Michio Kaku

     Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21rst Century

     Physics of the Future

    The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind

And maybe my one math book:

Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife

Art and Photography books are on the other side of the gate and I have quite a few.

Edward Hopper

The Three Generations of Wyeths

Several of the Impressionists including Van Gogh

I have a large number of raised beds of poetry books:

Langston Hughes

Robert Frost

Billy Collins

100 Love Sonnets by Pablo Neruda

And many anthologies

Plays are to the right of the poetry near the gazebo.

Tennessee Williams (I have a whole book to read of his plays this year on my TBR pile)

Lillian Helman

Neil Simon

Eugene O’Neill

Children’s books of all ages are in hanging baskets all along the terrace and down the side of the steps and hanging off balconies of my house.

Harry Potter

A Wrinkle in Time

Jinx

Little Women

Anne of Green Gables

The Borrowers

The Fog Diver and sequel The Lost Compass

Older classics are down by the lake.

Dickens

Austen

Brontes

George Eliot

Sir Walter Scott

Historical fiction is in the middle by the sundial.

The Lymond Chronicles

The House of Niccolo

Books by Kenneth Roberts

War and Peace

Romance is under the maple tree.

Far Pavilions

As You Wish (Jennifer Malin)

Jane Eyre

The Bronze Horseman

Georgette Heyer stories

Biographies, Autobiographies and Memoirs are on the first terrace with a section for books based on real people under the copy of the statue of David (much smaller than the original).

John Adams

Catherine the Great

Sir Francis Drake

Destiny of the Republic (Garfield)

The Black Count

Taylor Branch series:

    Parting of the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963    

    Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65    

   At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68

Essays are next to them at the end of the row.

Loren Eiseley's Night Country

Travel books are on the second terrace.

William Least Heat-Moon

    River Horse

    Blue Highways

Non-fiction books have the whole side garden on the right of the house and there are sub gardens there with History and War stories.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

The Cat from Hue

Gettysburg (Sears)

Fiction stories have the left side of the garden with huge sections nearly an acre in size of scifi/fantasy and mysteries.   There are sub gardens with dragons, space operas and aliens.  There is a raised bed of King Arthur stories in the middle circle. 

The Little Paris Bookshop

In the First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Charioteer by Mary Renault

East of Eden

Of Mice and Men

Cry, the Beloved Country

Books about writing are near the side porch with a bench beside them.

Writing the Natural Way Gabrielle Lusser Rico

Pain and Possibility Gabrielle Lusser

Short stories are along the path to the lake. 

Malgudi Days by Narayan

….….…..….

What does your metaphorical book garden look like?

Do you have a fountain?  What kind of statues do you have? 

Do you have a special place for your most favorite books so you can re-read them?

Diaries of the Week:

Write On! Nevertheless, she persisted.

By SensibleShoes  

www.dailykos.com/...

………………

Introducing the New Kos Katalogue!

By Avilyn  

www.dailykos.com/...

…………….

How Daily Kos Can Become Central to the Rebel Alliance: The FOIA.

By Tortmaster  

www.dailykos.com/...

…………….

Black History Month -- Join the Funky Parade!

By MT Spaces  

www.dailykos.com/...

………….

Black History Month – The Funky Parade Part II

By MT Spaces  

www.dailykos.com/...

......……..

SNLC, Vol. DLXXIX / UDKCJ 55: Seattle Voices from the Seven Edition

By chingchongchinaman  

www.dailykos.com/...

……………

Contemporary Literary Fiction: Notes and notices

By bookgirl  

www.dailykos.com/…

…..….…….…….

First, and likely only, footage of French novelist Marcel Proust surfaces

www.rawstory.com/...

 

Literature experts believe an extraordinary film clip of a 1904 wedding -- stored in the French national film archives -- very likely features the only known footage of legendary French writer Marcel Proust…

All Times are EDT, EST

NOTE: 

Coming out August 22, Beast and Crown by Joel Ross.

Ji is a boot boy who becomes so much more as he seeks to save a friend, a child enslaved to a loom.  The Rite of the Diadem is supposed to choose a new ruler who can save humanity.  Terra-cotta warriors stand ready to be wakened to help fight against beasts who threaten the land.  Ji and his friends accompany Brace, a young nobleman, to the rite and then they learn what it is all about. 

Can they escape their fate and help others? 

Goblins, ogres, mermaids.  Are they the enemy?

Enter the story into an interesting land where magic is gathered to the Summer Queen and we find out who will be her heir.

Thanks, Joel, for an ARC. 

……………...

Note:  I am still enjoying The Invisible Library series by Genevieve Cogman.  This is from the third book, The Burning Page:

Pg. 3

World G-133: Status-Police Interest

The Traverse to this world is out-of-bounds for at least the next month.  This is because the Franco-Prussian Empire’s police force is taking far too close an interest in the site of the gate.  We also wish to make it absolutely clear that Librarians should not attempt to use the Library to transport dinosaur eggs. 

And if they do disregard this rule, under no circumstances should they draw official in-world attention while doing so.  In fact, we wish to remind all Librarians that they are here to collect books, not dinosaurs.  Those Librarians who have problems distinguishing between the two should take a refresher course in Library basics.

Whilst dipping in and out of various books, I ran across some interesting links this week.

Stephen Sondheim will receive this year's PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award, following Dylan's winning the Nobel Prize. The award goes to a "critically acclaimed writer whose body of work helps us understand and interpret the human condition," according to the PEN news release in the New York Times.

I'd say anyone who contributed to West Side Story and Sweeney Todd knows something about the human condition.

And although the purview of this diary series is literary fiction published within the past two years or so, I am an omnivore when it comes to reading.

So this arbitrary list of "modern classics" published from 1950-1997 was interesting. Some of my favorite authors, including Pym, Rushdie, Ishiguro, Robinson and Alexie, are included. And the list is a good reminder of yet more books I had planned to discover by now.

Rita Dove managed to be alarming and comforting at the same time in this Salon article. Words matter, and we need them to help retain our humanity in these dark times.

Finally, I have started Han Kang's Human Acts, set during the 1980 Gwangju uprising in South Korea. It's harrowing and lyrical. The opening pages have the narrator helping at a makeshift morgue. This is the author’s home town, and the words are paying homage to the people who survived and did what they could for others, and to the people who were lost. Important concepts that I do not want to lose sight of, even when I spend part of the day laughing at some of the inept things coming from the Trump administration.