Book Review: My Sister, The Serial Killer (Nigeria, murder, murder, . . . . family) (OT)

My Sister, The Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Doubleday, 2018, 226 pages, $22.95)

 My Kind of Book

Small and short. Short chapters. Actually the hardback copy is the size of a paperback!

Fascinating Title! Intriguing Cover!

Who wouldn’t want to read this book? But, will it be grisly?

My Sister. . . .

Is blood really thicker than water? How does your family compare to the one in the book? Does either parent favor one child, or even seem to (to the other child)? Perhaps (hopefully!) you don’t have a serial killer or even a murderer in your family but does one member always seem to have to rescue the other? Or, does one member always bully or pick on the other? If so, why do they stay together? Because they are family and therefore, one (the serial killer) needs the other (the nurse) and because the nurse envies her sister?

Also in Portuguese

Will the tables ever turn? Will your younger sister ever grow up and stop stealing your boyfriends? Will you ever move out and force her to face her problems?

The Setting

Lagos, Nigeria (a megalopolis). Names that American readers are not used to.

A Very Unusual Read!

Book Review: Lot: Stories (Houston, ethics, poverty) (OT)

Lot: Stories, by Bryan Washington (Riverhead Books, 2019, 222 pages, $25)

If a book can be melodic, this is it. “. . . talking, words bursting our of my nose, my ears, . . . . “

What is a Family?

A story of stories of Houston, on first names with streets* and neighborhoods but now you see them in a different light from different eyes (hookers, druggies, dealers, workers).

On first names with a hurricane: before Harvey, after Rita. If you can afford to come back, if you can afford to come back AND to rebuild. If not, . . . .”Rumors glide through the complex like vines.” (p. 14)

A Different Houston

Author Bryan Washington shows us a different Houston, a different life, peopled with disintegration and a different set of ethics. Is it real? Just as one seems to be getting his life together, he is shot down (or dies in a car accident) but there are those who get out and get a PhD – how, is anyone’s guess: the survival of the fittest. For the few, the very few.

“Gloria blew through our lives on a Wednesday, and our mother told us to treat her like pottery, to not ask questions, to creep around the house like ants before their queen. Our mother, who returned grape bunches over single sourings; who’d shipped my sister, Nikki, to Tech with a knife in her pillowcase; who’d slipped into this country, this home, her life, on the whim of a fortune-teller, . . . . “ (p. 43)

Enigma

Lot is an enigma, a puzzle that is not too hard to figure out but you will still be proud of yourself that you can figure it out. Thanks for chapter titles rather than chapter numbers (titles that can mostly be understood, being street names in Houston). You can read each chapter as a stand-alone or in series (better in series, but possible the other way around). Some chapters introduce a new character (Gloria) who is never mentioned again but the chapter in question is all about them and how that person fits into the family and what that person does to advance the story, the break-up.

Lot is an enigma that challenges you to place each chapter in the time dimension, e.g., what has transpired since the previous chapter ended is slowly made apparent and the intervening time can be very long in time and space.

Lot is an enigma in that author Bryan Washington writes a lot of dialogue but without quotation marks – you have to remember who is speaking.

When Does a Family Die?

One by one, they leave. . . .

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*”They touched eyes taking out the trash on MLK Boulevard.” (p. 7)

Book Review: The Plateau (WW2, anthropology) (OT)

The Plateau, by Maggie Paxson (Riverhead Books/Penguin, 2019, $28, 358 pages)

Every once in a while, you come upon a book that is a rare gem from the very first pages. (On the other hand, there are some books that you can tell in the first few pages you will find boring and time-taxing but must nevertheless read because you are a book reviewer.)

The Plateau, by author Maggie Paxson, falls into the former category.  I found the book so inspiring and thought-provoking that I looked up information about the locations, the incidents and the author whose writing style is so, so - melodic.

The Plots

Few books attempt the difficult task of going back and forth in time: The Plateau does so, and accomplishes it seamlessly as it relates two plots intersecting in location, not in time. One may only become mixed up towards the end (or if one reads only every few days) merely because one is slightly taxed reading such a long pair of stories (might it be shorter next time, please?)

The Plateau

The plateau, where Albert Camus wrote The Plague, is a region in south central France near the Alps where one small town of 2,000 residents, whose residents as a whole, protect hundreds if not thousands of immigrants and refugees without a thought to any possible danger (“Risk means facing fears. . . .” p. 180) during the Nazi occupation of the 30s and 40s as well as before and also in contemporary times with today’s influx of people from many countries. It is simply the right thing to do. The plateau is the region visited by our author, an anthropologist*, doing her fieldwork** (she lived there for a while after fieldwork in Soviet locations, and returns to visit).

The Stories

Author Maggie Paxson, PhD, lives in the plateau to try and determine why these residents do what they do and, also, to study peace (so many others have studied war) and why some people are good (“How to be good when it’s hard to be good.” p. 61). She finds that her great-grandmother’s rebel brother*** (one of 12 siblings) was “called” to this region to run a school for children from many countries (including Jewish children but not limited to them). Brother Daniel’s work with the children made him profoundly happy even as he decided not to pursue a doctorate during WW2 or to get married. For this decision, he ended up in Majdanek. . . .

Why?

Perhaps because “This physically beautiful place has somehow produced a morally beautiful people. . . .To be born here makes you good.” (p.55)

What I Would Change

Although I did (finally) understand the front cover illustrations and the innocuous title, I believe more people would find this book if it had a magnetic title or at least a subtitle – very minor comments, indeed.

On the whole, perhaps the best book this reviewer has read in a year!

*An anthropologist attempts to define who is us and who is them. A participant-observer, she searches to discern a group’s Law of Silence (“I didn’t understand the Law of Silence on the Plateau, but one day, I obeyed it anyway, and was silent. And then people began to speak.” p. 118) An anthropologist also attempts to discover who does what with whom.

*“*Fieldwork is always hard at the beginning. . . .You arrive, and almost immediately you are lost.” (p. 60)

***Primarily thanks to the detailed records of the Nazis, Paxson was able to follow Daniel’s life from his beginning in his family’s school in northern France, to Beirut, to the plateau, to Majdanek, to Israel where a tree has been planted in Daniel’s honor.

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“A French Village Committed to Deception” (BBC)

“A Culture of Selflessness” (WSJ)

“Ordinary People Risking Their Lives for an Extraordinary Purpose” (Wash. City Paper)

Book Review: Aloha Rodeo (Hawaiian cowboys, Wyoming's Frontier Days) (OT)

Aloha Rodeo: Three Hawaiian Cowboys, The World’s Greatest Rodeo, and a Hidden History of the American West, by David Wolman and Julian Smith (HarperCollins, 2019, 242 pages, $27.99)

A: What did Hawaii and Wyoming* have in common in 1908?

A: Cowboys!

Q: Cowboys?

A: Yup.

Primarily a history book, Aloha Rodeo will tie many well-known facts together if you have lived in Hawaii or Wyoming (or even many locations in the West) – from the annexation** of Hawaii to the near-extinction of the American buffalo to wild cattle (an invasive species) introduction on the Big Island to the Parker Ranch, a town in itself with 300,00 acres. From Queen Liliuokalani to Cheyenne’s Frontier Days (according to Wikipedia, the rodeo is now ten days long!)

Fortunately, the book is fairly short for other readers. The first couple of chapters can easily be skipped with no loss of momentum while the crux of the story, about the three Hawaiian cowboys (paniolo) who win surprisingly at an early rodeo on the mainland, takes only the final quarter of the book and sounds much like the re-telling of an athletic competition, play by play.

Surprising tidbits of historical culture can be found: having canines for dinner (and not for company), the history of bulldogging and how real canine bulldogs did their job, the origin of the name of the Buffalo Soldiers, a wolf-roping event*** that was such a disaster, it was never held again.

Another thread running through Aloha Rodeo educates the reader about the Wild West of America which lasted only a few decades before the Easterners started idealizing the rapidly disappearing life and times of the American Cowboy with dime-store novels and not-so-realistic re-enactments of life such as Custer’s Last Stand and Wild Bill Cody’s Wild West Show with Annie Oakley. What the Easterners wanted, the Easterners got, in the way of titillation, much of which ended up in our children’s history books.

This reviewer believes the subtitle is quite a bit off as well. The reader expects a story about three Hawaiian cowboys but that only really begins two-thirds of the way through. Aloha Rodeo is primarily a history book with a few stories tossed in, followed by a blow-by-blow description of a rodeo. For those not familiar with rodeos, it may awaken an interest. The World’s Greatest Rodeo may refer to Cheyenne’s Frontier Days although the Calgary Stampede was more familiar to this reviewer growing up in the American West. And finally, this reviewer never really found out what the hidden history of the American West referred to. Perhaps an Easterner will understand that, however.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of topics touched upon to whet the appetite besides rodeos and the equine history of the Hawaiian Islands and their invasion by Americans: the near extinction of the buffalo, women’s rights, cowboy life, to name a few major ones.
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*Wyoming’s motto: Equal Rights (a story in itself about women in the Wild West). According to the Denver Post, writing about an early rodeo in Wyoming, “When a young lady is gritty as well as pretty, she wins the crowd.” (p. 192)

**Hawaii surrendered to the US in 1898 and, two years later, held the Big Island’s first Fourth of July rodeo. The state has historically been a crossroads of people and cultures: in 1900, the island of Hawaii’s population of 154,000 was composed of 20% Hawaiians, 40% Japanese, 7% Caucasian (haole), 17% Chinese, 11% Portuguese and 5% part-Hawaiian while the mainland was 90% white –  Hawaii was truly more of a melting pot than the mainland was.

***Wolves were feared and hated in the West of yesteryear. This event consisted of roping two wolves, half-grown canines, one of which was petrified and took to ground in the grass, attempting to hide, trembling, while the other was lassoed after only 50 yards and then drug behind the galloping equine. Fortunately, the audience was not impressed with this barbarous cruelty and the event never again was part of Frontier Days.