Today, I started reading "Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing" by Ben Jealous, the Executive Director of the Sierra Club. The book highlights how the path to healing America's broken heart begins with each of us having the courage to heal ourselves. According to Mr. Jealous, it would be transformative if every American treated each other as cousins.
by Ben Jealous
Today, I started reading “Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing” by Ben Jealous, the Executive Director of the Sierra Club. The book highlights how the path to healing America’s broken heart begins with each of us having the courage to heal ourselves. According to Mr. Jealous, it would be transformative if every American treated each other as cousins.
Ben Jealous is the son of parents who had to leave Maryland because their cross-racial marriage was illegal.
I briefly met Ben Jealous last May when I went to Washington with the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism‘s Day of Action. When I saw Mr. Jealous speaking at Temple Emanu-El in neighboring Westfield, I immediately signed up to attend in person. He is an inspiration as an advocate for the environment, civil rights, and the healing of America’s broken heart.
His lively, courageous, and empathetic storytelling calls on every American to look past deeply cut divisions and recognize that we are all in the same boat now. Along the way, Jealous grapples with hidden American mysteries, including:
The book Never Forget Our People Were Always Free is told through parables. It features intimate glimpses of political and faith leaders such as Jack Kemp, Stacey Abrams, and the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The book also highlights unlikely heroes such as a retired constable, a female pirate from Madagascar, a long-lost Irishman, a death row inmate, and a man with a Confederate flag over his heart.
Never Forget Our People Were Always Free offers readers hope that America’s oldest wounds can heal and her oldest divisions can be overcome.
Although I have only read a handful of pages of the book, I highly recommend it!
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by Yiyun Li
Yiyun Li, grappling with life’s deepest sorrows, invites readers into a poignant conversation between a mother and child in a timeless world. Where Reasons End, composed in the aftermath of the loss of her son, ventures into the liminal space between life and death. Here, mother and child engage in conversations untethered from past images and narratives, a profoundly moving portrayal of the love and complexity of their relationship.
The narrator of Where Reasons End shares a profound insight, saying, “I clung to one delusion with all my might: We once gave Nikolai a life of flesh and blood; and I’m recreating it, this time through words.” This emotional journey of recreating a life through words is a central theme that resonates throughout the novel.
With a unique blend of originality, precision, and poise, Where Reasons End immerses readers in a world of intimacy, inescapable pain, and fierce love. The novel’s emotional impact is profound, leaving a lasting impression on those who delve into its pages.
Yiyun Li, a prolific author, has penned six works of fiction—Must I Go, Where Reasons End, Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl—and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life.
Her literary prowess has been recognized with numerous awards, including a PEN/Hemingway Award, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize.
She was also featured in The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 fiction issue. Her work, which has been published in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications, is a testament to her literary excellence.
Currently, she imparts her knowledge at Princeton University and resides in Princeton, New Jersey.
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by George Saunders
My journey with “Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel” by George Saunders began with recognition as one of The New York Times’ 100 Best Books of the Century. As I turned its pages, I was immersed in its profound exploration of living and loving in the face of inevitable endings. The book, which struck a personal chord with me after a loss, is a testament to Saunders’ storytelling prowess and a must-read for those interested in Abraham Lincoln.
February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has already realized it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him home.” Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy’s body.
From a seed of historical truth, George Saunders weaves an unforgettable tale of familial love and loss that transcends its realistic, historical framework. The story takes a daring leap into a realm that is hilarious and terrifyingly supernatural. Willie Lincoln’s journey in a strange purgatory, where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance, is a testament to Saunders’ imaginative prowess. The monumental struggle over young Willie’s soul in this transitional state, known as the bardo in the Tibetan tradition, is a narrative that will leave you spellbound.
Lincoln in the Bardo is an astonishing feat of imagination and a bold step forward from one of his generation’s most important and influential writers. Formally daring, generous in spirit, and deeply concerned with matters of the heart, it is a testament to fiction’s ability to speak honestly and powerfully about the things that matter to us. Saunders has invented a thrilling new form that deploys a kaleidoscopic, theatrical panorama of voices to ask a timeless, profound question: How do we live and love when we know everything we love must end?
George Saunders is the author of thirteen books, including the novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize, and five collections of stories, including Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the recent collection Liberation Day (selected by former President Obama as one of his ten favorite books of 2022).
Three of Saunders’s books—Pastoralia, Tenth of December, and Lincoln in the Bardo—were chosen for The New York Times’s list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. Saunders hosts the popular Story Club on Substack, which grew out of his book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. In 2013, he was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.
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by Hillary Jordan
Aftermirth by Hillary Jordan is a book about grief as the two protagonists take a road trip that is a darkly funny journey of healing that takes them deep into the heart of their suffering and others, and then beyond it, to a place of peace and laughter. I had just finished reading When She Woke by Ms. Jordan and having enjoyed that book, reading a second one by the same author seemed reasonable.
When I selected this short novel to read, I questioned if it was a good choice for me.
I found it easier to read and, in some ways, helpful. It was like meeting fellow widows from my Zoom grief groups in person at Camp Widow. The ability to laugh about our loss and cry openly is essential to meeting fellow benefits.
Michael Larssen, the narrator, raised a question I have not and still do not want to consider. What if I am still alive, Jan was a great love but is not the love of my life?
“You can’t know that he was the love of your life, and do you know why? Because guess what, you aren’t dead yet. You may feel dead right now, and believe me I’ve been there, but the fact is, until you’re lying under a tombstone of your own you can’t be sure about anything. You could prick your finger on one of your roses tomorrow, and as you’re climbing the stairs to get a Band-Aid, you trip over one of the pugs and tumble to your death. Or you could meet a man in the checkout line at the grocery store–hell, you could meet a woman even and fall madly in love with her and end up with six kids and twenty grandkids. Michael looks over at Elena, then back at George. You just don’t know, George. That’s the thing. None of us does.”— Aftermirth (Kindle Single) by Hillary Jordan
Despite my anxiety about considering this disturbing question, I highly recommend Aftermirth by Hillary Jordan.
The Goodreads summary provides an overview.
I stopped being funny the day my wife was electrocuted by her underwire bra.” So begins “Aftermirth,” a dark comedy that explores the absurdity of death through the eyes of thirty-one-year-old comedian, writer, and actor Michael Larssen. What is funny to the rest of the world is devastating to Michael, who loves his wife deeply, exceptionally her bright, rippling, abandoned laughter, which captivated him from the first time he heard it. In the aftermath of her death, he loses his sense of humor and his career.
Then, after two years of mourning her, he sees an article in the paper about a factory worker named Julio Santiago who fell into a giant vat of dough and was kneaded to death. For reasons Michael doesn’t understand, he decides to go to the man’s wake. There he meets and bonds with Julio’s twenty-nine-year-old daughter Elena, a law student who is reeling from her father’s unexpected and preposterous death.
Three months later, she calls him out of the blue and suggests that the two of them drive to North Carolina to speak with another survivor like themselves Elena has found on the Internet. Their road trip is a darkly funny journey of healing that takes them deep into the heart of their grief and others and then beyond it to a place of peace and laughter.
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by Colin Walsh
Today, I started reading “Kala: A Novel” by Colin Walsh, a gripping literary page-turner from a rising Irish talent. Former friends, estranged for twenty years, reckon with the terrifying events of the summer that changed their lives. Three old friends are reunited in the seaside town of Kinlough, on Ireland’s west coast, for the first time in years.
Helen, Joe, and Mush were part of an original group of six inseparable teenagers in the summer of 2003, with motherless, reckless Kala Lanann as their group’s white-hot center. Soon after that summer’s peak, Kala disappeared without a trace.
Now it’s fifteen years later:
But human remains are discovered in the woods. Two more girls have gone missing. As past and present begin to collide, the estranged friends are forced to confront their involvement in the events that led to Kala’s disappearance.
Against the backdrop of a town suffocating on its secrets, in a story that builds from a smolder to a stunning climax, Kala brilliantly examines the sometimes brutal costs of belonging and the battle in the human heart between vengeance and forgiveness, despair and redemption.
by Hisham Matar'
Today, I started reading Hisham Matar’s “My Friends: A Novel.” It is a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction and the winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. This novel explores themes of friendship, family, and the harsh realities of exile. Hisham Matar is also the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Return.” The pages on my Kindle App on my iPad fly like autumn’s falling leaves.
One evening, a young boy named Khaled, growing up in Benghazi, hears a captivating short story read aloud on the radio. The story, about a man being eaten alive by a cat, leaves an indelible mark on Khaled, igniting a lifelong fascination with the power of words and the enigmatic author, Hosam Zowa. This transformative experience sets Khaled on a journey that will lead him far from home to the University of Edinburgh to pursue a life of the mind.
In a new and unfamiliar environment, Khaled finds himself far from his familiar life in Libya. His resilience is tested when he attends a protest against the Qaddafi regime in London. The event turns into a tragedy, leaving Khaled injured and unable to leave Britain. Despite the danger posed by monitored phone lines, his determination to communicate his situation to his parents is a testament to his strength.
When Khaled has a chance encounter with Hosam Zowa, the author of a life-changing short story, at a hotel, Khaled begins the most profound friendship of his life. This friendship sustains him and eventually compels him, as the Arab Spring unfolds, to confront complex tensions between revolution and safety, family and exile, and how to define his sense of self concerning those closest to him.
A profound exploration of friendship and family and how time can test and fray these bonds, ‘My Friends‘ is a work of literature that resonates with its readers. Hisham Matar’s novel is not just a story but an achingly beautiful reflection on life and relationships crafted by an author at the peak of his powers.
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by Carol Berkin
Revolutionary Mothers by Carol Berkin, Presidential Professor of American Colonial and Revolutionary History; Women’s History Professor at Baruch College, is one of four books I purchased after my first One Day University Class on February 9, 2019. It should be required reading!
The book explains how women of the Revolution were most active at home, organizing boycotts of British goods, raising funds for the fledgling nation, and managing the family business while struggling to maintain a modicum of normalcy as husbands, brothers, and fathers died.
It was not just the men who fought on the front lines, as in the story of Margaret Corbin, who was crippled for life when she took her husband’s place beside a cannon at Fort Monmouth. She explains the mystery of Molly Pitcher (she was not a person but a group of women), camp followers, women who spied for their country, Loyalist women, and the impact on African American and Native women.
This intelligent and comprehensive history brings these forgotten stories to their rightful place in the struggle for American independence. Dr. Birkin also highlights how their efforts set the stage for the continuing campaign for gender equality.
