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517. Van Gogh, The Life

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:    Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith

Genre:  Non Fiction, History, Art, Biography

976 pages, published October 18, 2011

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Hoopla

Summary

Van Gogh, The Life is an incredibly detailed, exhaustive look at the life of Impressionist Vincent Van Gogh from his birth to his early death at age 37.  We follow Vincent’s early struggles to find his place in the world, his conflicted relationship with family, including art dealer brother Theo who financially supported Vincent during most of his life, his intense relationship with fellow Impressionist Paul Gaugin, his move to Provence, where in an explosion of productivity he painted some of the best-loved works in Western art and finally to the  mental illness he combated during a significant portion of his brief life.

Quotes 

“It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.”

 

“I dream my painting and I paint my dream.”

 

 “…and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?”

 

“There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.”

 

“A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke”

 

“I don’t know anything with certainty, but seeing the stars makes me dream.”

 

“Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.”

 

“If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.”

 

“What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.”

 

“Close friends are truly life’s treasures. Sometimes they know us better than we know ourselves. With gentle honesty, they are there to guide and support us, to share our laughter and our tears. Their presence reminds us that we are never really alone.”

 

 “What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?”

 “If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is a grass in the beginning.”

 

“The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.”

 

“Art is to console those who are broken by life.”

 

“If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere.”

 

“I try more and more to be myself, caring relatively little whether people approve or disapprove.”

 

“Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.”

 

“I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say ‘he feels deeply, he feels tenderly’.”

 

“It is with the reading of books the same as with looking at pictures; one must, without doubt, without hesitations, with assurance, admire what is beautiful.”

 

“I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.”

 

“At present I absolutely want to paint a starry sky. It often seems to me that night is still more richly coloured than the day; having hues of the most intense violets, blues and greens. If only you pay attention to it you will see that certain stars are lemon-yellow, others pink or a green, blue and forget-me-not brilliance. And without my expatiating on this theme it is obvious that putting little white dots on the blue-black is not enough to paint a starry sky.”

 

 “It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper meaning.”

 

My Take

I listened to the audio version of Van Gogh, The Life in connection with a class I took on Vincent Van Gogh.  It is an extremely long book that would have benefited tremendously from editing out some of the slower and repetitive portions.  That said, I did learn A LOT about Vincent Van Gogh, who in addition to being an artistic genius was a world class narcissist and free loader.  Vincent’s letters make clear that often acted like a real jerk, expecting his brother Theo to continuously provide him with material support with no questions asked while sometimes looking down on Theo because he was a businessman and not an artist.  A unique character!

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514. The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Drue Emerson

Author:  Bill Bishop

Genre:  Non Fiction, History, Politics, Public Policy

384 pages, published May 7, 2008

Reading Format:   E-Book on Hoopla

Summary

The Big Sort is a social science look at the reasons why America has become so culturally and politically divided. In the past several decades, we have sorted ourselves by neighborhood, religion, political beliefs and culture to the point where many of us now live in echo chambers.

Quotes 

“As people seek out the social settings they prefer—as they choose the group that makes them feel the most comfortable—the nation grows more politically segregated—and the benefit that ought to come with having a variety of opinions is lost to the righteousness that is the special entitlement of homogeneous groups.”

 

“like-minded, homogeneous groups squelch dissent, grow more extreme in their thinking, and ignore evidence that their positions are wrong. As a result, we now live in a giant feedback loop, hearing our own thoughts about what’s right and wrong bounced back to us by the television shows we watch, the newspapers and books we read, the blogs we visit online, the sermons we hear, and the neighborhoods we live in.”

 

“Education is presumed to nurture an appreciation of diversity: the more schooling, the greater the respect for works of literature and art, different cultures, and various types of music. Certainly, well-educated Americans see themselves as worldly, nuanced, and comfortable with difference. Education also should make us curious about—even eager to hear—different political points of view. But it doesn’t. The more educated Americans become—and the richer—the less likely they are to discuss politics with those who have different points of view.”

 

“Over the last generation, however, these two moral syndromes emerged in families and then sorted into Republican and Democrat. In 1992, there was little difference between the parties on the child-rearing scale. By 2000, the differences were distinct, and by 2004 the gap had grown wide and deep. Answers to questions about child rearing, in fact, provided a better gauge of party affiliation than did income.* The parenting scale was also more closely aligned with “moral issues” than political orientation. Knowing whether a person was a nurturant parent or a strict father provided a better guide to his or her thinking about gay rights than knowing whether he or she was a liberal or a conservative, a Republican or a Democrat.”

 

“The child-rearing scale also helped explain the steady migration of the white working class away from the Democratic Party. It showed that Evangelicals were largely strict fathers. And in 2004, voters who had attended graduate school had a strict father score on the four-question survey that was only half that of voters who hadn’t graduated from high school. “Little wonder our politics today are polarized,” Hetherington and Weiler concluded. “The values of Republicans and Democrats are very much at odds. We do not agree about the most fundamental of issues.”

 

My Take

While I found The Big Sort to make some interesting points and got me thinking a bit more about our country’s polarization, it was a bit dense and at times a slog to get through.  It would have benefited from more personal anecdotes.

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509. Tax-Free Wealth, 2nd Edition: How to Build Massive Wealth by Permanently Lowering Your Taxes

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Tom Wheelwright

Genre:  Non Fiction, Business, Self Improvement

282 pages, published April 2, 2019

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

Tax-Free Wealth is about tax planning concepts and how to use tax laws to your benefit. Author Tom Wheelwright explains how the tax laws work and how they are designed to reduce you taxes, not to increase them, as long as you do things the government wants you to like start a business or own real estate.

Quotes 

“The hardest thing in the world to understand is income taxes. – Albert Einstein”

“TAX TIP: Put your family to work. Make your business a family business. Then when you travel for business, your family’s travel is deductible. And you can shift income from your higher tax bracket to their lower tax bracket. This creates permanent tax savings.”

 

My Take

As an inveterate optimizer, I am always looking for ways to lower our taxes.  However, since my husband and I have both recently retired, a lot of this book (which is geared toward business owners) is not applicable to us.  But I did pick up some useful tips on real estate depreciation that I plan to use when we buy a beach house rental in the next few years.

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501. Interior Chinatown

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Jennifer Lum

Author:   Charles Yu

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction, Cultural

273  pages, published  January 28, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

In Interior Chinatown, author Charles Yu explores the roles played by Chinese Americans over the last 150 years and touches on issues of race, pop culture, immigration, and assimilation.  His protagonist is Willis Wu who is portrayed as an average Asian man who lives in the Chinatown area of Los Angeles and works at the Golden Palace restaurant where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production.  Willis has a bit part on the show, but dreams of being Kung Fu Guy, the highest aspiration he can imagine for himself.

Quotes 

“There are a few years when you make almost all of your important memories. And then you spend the next few decades reliving them.”

 

“You’re here, supposedly, in a new land full of opportunity, but somehow have gotten trapped in a pretend version of the old country.”

 

“As, everyone knows, water hates poor people. Given the opportunity, water will always find a way to make poor people miserable, typically at the worst time possible.”

 

“The truth is, she’s a weirdo. Just like you were. Are. A glorious, perfectly weird weirdo. Like all kids before they forget how to be exactly how weird they really are. Into whatever they’re into, pure. Before knowing. Before they learn from others how to act. Before they learn they are Asian, or Black, or Brown, or White. Before they learn that all the things they are and about all the things they will never be.”

 

“……cut us off from our families, our history. So we made it our own place – Chinatown. A place for preservation and self-preservation; give them what they feel what’s right, is safe; make it fit the idea of what is out there..Chinatown and indeed being chinese is and always has been, from the very beginning a construction,a performance of features, gestures, culture and exoticism, invention/reinvention of stylization.”

 

“But at the same time, I’m guilty, too. Guilty of playing this role. Letting it define me. Internalizing the role so completely that I’ve lost track of where reality starts and the performance begins. And letting that define how I see other people. I’m as guilty of it as anyone. Fetishizing Black people and their coolness. Romanticizing White women. Wishing I were a White man. Putting myself into this category.”

 

“Unofficially, we understood. There was a ceiling. Always had been, always would be. Even for him. Even for our hero, there were limits to the dream of assimilation, to how far any of you could make your way into the world of Black and White.”

 

“[Willis is] asking to be treated like an American. A real American. Because, honestly, when you think American, what color do you see? White? Black? We’ve been here two hundred years. Why doesn’t this face register as American?”

 

“She says that telling a love story is something one person does. Being in love takes both of them. Putting her on a pedestal is just a different way of being alone.”

 

“The widest gulf in the world is the distance between getting by, and not getting by.”

 

“This is it. The root of it all. The real history of yellow people in America. Two hundred years of being perpetual foreigners.”

 

“Black and White always look good. A lot of it has to do with the lighting, designed to hit their faces just right. Someday you want the light to hit your face like that. To look like the hero. Or for a moment to actually be the hero”

 

“You came here, your parents and their parents and their parents, and you always seem to have just arrived and yet never seem to have actually arrived.”

 

“You wish your face was more—more, something. You don’t know what. Maybe not more. Less. Less flat. Less delicate. More rugged. Your jawline more defined. This face that feels like a mask, that has never felt quite right on you. That reminds you, at odd times, and often after two to four drinks, that you’re Asian. You are Asian! Your brain forgets sometimes. But then your face reminds you.”

 

“Able to pass in any situation as may be required,” she says. “I get it all. Brazilian, Filipina, Mediterranean, Eurasian. Or just a really tan White girl with exotic-looking eyes. Everywhere I go, people think I’m one of them. They want to claim me for their tribe.”

 

“Mr. Wu, is it true that you have an internalized sense of inferiority?

 

That because on the one hand you, for obvious reasons, have not been and can never be fully assimilated into mainstream, i.e., White America— And on the other hand neither do you feel fully justified in claiming solidarity with other historically and currently oppressed groups. That while your community’s experience in the United States has included racism on the personal and the institutional levels, including but not limited to: immigration quotas, actual federal legislation expressly excluding people who look like you from entering the country. Legislation that was in effect for almost a century. Antimiscegenation laws. Discriminatory housing policies. Alien land laws and restrictive covenants. Violation of civil liberties including internment. That despite all of that, you somehow feel that your oppression, because it does not include the original American sin—of slavery—that it will never add up to something equivalent. That the wrongs committed against your ancestors are incommensurate in magnitude with those committed against Black people in America. And whether or not that quantification, whether accurate or not, because of all of this you feel on some level that you maybe can’t even quite verbalize, out of shame or embarrassment, that the validity and volume of your complaints must be calibrated appropriately, must be in proportion to the aggregate suffering of your people.

Your oppression is second-class.”

 

“Cross that gap and everything changes. Being on this side of it means that time becomes your enemy. You don’t grind the day—the day grinds you. With the passing of every month your embarrassment compounds, accumulates with the inevitability of a simple arithmetic truth. X is less than Y, and there’s nothing to be done about that. The daily mail bringing with it fresh dread or relief, but if the latter, only the most temporary kind, restarting the clock on the countdown to the next bill or past-due notice or collection agency call.”

 

 “If you didn’t know it already, now you do: old dudes from rural Taiwan are comfortable with their karaoke and when they do karaoke for some reason they love no one like they love John Denver.”

 

 “Bruce Lee was proof: not all Asian Men were doomed to a life of being Generic. If there was even one guy who had made it, it was at least theoretically possible for the rest. But easy cases make bad law, and Bruce Lee proved too much. He was a living, breathing video game boss-level, a human cheat code, an idealized avatar of Asian-ness and awesomeness permanently set on Expert difficulty. Not a man so much as a personification, not a mortal so much as a deity on loan to you and your kind for a fixed period of time. A flame that burned for all yellow to understand, however briefly, what perfection was like.”

 

My Take

While there are some interesting and entertaining parts of Interior Chinatown, the book just did not do it for me.  Part of the reason is that it is primarily a vehicle of delivering racial grievances (this time on behalf of Asian Americans) and after a year of non stop racial grievances (2020), I’m wearied by more of the same.

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491. The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000s: An Oral History

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Andy Greene

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Cultural, Biography, Humor

464 pages, published  March 24, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

Interspersed with quotes from the creators, writers, and actors of The Office, this book is a behind the scenes account of one of the most iconic television shows of the 2000’s.  Readers are invited behind the scenes of their favorite moments and characters. Starting with the original BBC show starring Ricky Gervais, we go through the entire nine-season run in America.

Quotes 

“We’re so divided as a nation, we’re so divided as a world, but the one thing that brings us together always is love and smiles and comedy and an outside family that makes you feel a part of it.”

 

“Even at the peak of its popularity around seasons four and five, The Office never generated ratings even comparable to sitcoms like Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory, procedural dramas like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and NCIS, or, especially, reality competition shows like American Idol and Dancing with the Stars. But bars all over America in 2019 don’t host Dancing with the Stars or NCIS trivia nights. The Big Bang Theory isn’t breaking streaming records on Netflix and teens aren’t bingeing Two and a Half Men on their phones. It’s The Office that has emerged as the most beloved sitcom of the 2000s and just gets bigger with each passing year.”

 

“The only thing that gives me an adrenaline rush is the idea. I wish I could just have the idea, watch it on telly, and not actually have to do anything.”

 

“Oscar Nunez (Oscar Martinez, Seasons 1–9): The great, great, great sitcoms of yore all had a simple premise. It’s character driven. Taxi’s just a fucking taxi place. Cheers is just a bar. That’s all it is. And we were just an office.”

 

“I saw Michael Scott as just socially desperate and yet good-hearted, which is probably how I would, in my darkest moments, describe myself. (Caroline Williams)”

 

“For me, Michael was just lonely. Loneliness is, at least for me, the most universal emotion. (Caroline Williams)”

 

 “What was so amazing about Steve was that as Michael Scott, he could make your skin crawl in one scene by being such a jerk, and such an asshole, and in the very next scene you would weep for him. You bled for the man because he was so blind to his own faults. (Randy Cordray)”

 

“A lot of my friends who have teenagers, they’ve shared with me that they watch it almost as an emotional soother. If they’re in a bad mood, they’ll just pop on The Office and they’ll binge-watch it. (Amy Ryan)”

 

“Larry Wilmore: There was a blog at the time called Television Without Pity. That was Twitter from back then. The Office got a whole section on it and people were pouring out love and opinions for The Office and the fan base really started growing during the season.”

 

My Take

I loved watching The Office when it was originally on TV (including the British version) and I love watching The Office years after it concluded on Netflix, this time with my kids who are huge fans.  It is comedy gold that stands the test of time.  This book is a well written, thorough, informative retrospective of the show and enhances subsequent viewing.

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489. Watch Me Disappear

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Janelle Brown

Genre:   Fiction, Romance, Mystery, Thriller

358 pages, published July 11, 2017

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Watch Me Disappear tells the story of Billie, Olive and Jonathan, a family that is torn apart when Mom Billie disappears while on a solo hiking trek and is presumed dead.  Olive and Jonathan are left to cope and wonder what happened.

Quotes 

“Who you want people to be makes you blind to who they really are.”

 

“You don’t realize how much you’ll miss the asphyxiating intimacy of early parenthood until you can finally breathe again.”

 

“All people are unknowable, no matter how close you may think you are. Of the millions of thoughts we all think every day, of the millions of experiences we have, how many do we allow other people to know about? A handful? And no one willingly shares their worst, do they? The flaws you see, those are like the very tip of an iceberg. So we’re all just poking around on the surface, trying to figure out the people we love with a kind of, I guess, naïve idealism.”

 

“Only someone fearful of his own ordinariness would buy, so unquestioningly, someone else’s extraordinariness. Maybe this is why they say love is blind: Who you want people to be makes you blind to who they really are.”

 

“You believe what you think you believe, until suddenly, you realize that you don’t anymore. Or maybe you do believe, but it’s no longer convenient to do so, so you decide to forget. You decide to find other beliefs, ones that more comfortably fit the constantly evolving puzzle of your life. To put it more finely: There are those beliefs that you will carry with you until the end of your days. A belief in friendliness; a belief in long vacations; a belief in the power of the press and the merits of good coffee. And then there are the beliefs that seem so vital when you are young, but that the passing years steadily leach out of you: a belief in not selling out; a belief in the superiority of the artist; a belief in hardwood floors and staying fit and your ability to change the world. Most of all: a belief that love is forever, that you can climb into a stranger’s heart and know that person and be known in return.”

 

“Take two people with a mutual willingness to connect, convince them to expose their innermost thoughts, and presto: true love.”

 

“Think about what a miracle it is that we’re all working in concert with one another. Every day humans get a fresh chance to decide whether we’re going to destroy each other or build a better world, and you know what? For the most part, we do the latter.”

 

“It didn’t seem fair, and then that love could fizzle,curdle, ossify into something less wonderful than what it once was. And then you were stuck, because, ultimately, love is a kind of trap. Once you find it, you can’t deviate from that commitment without everyone getting hurt. You can’t just leave. Instead, need wins out over freedom; and everyone stands around feeling wounded and bitter, letting inertia take over.”

 

My Take

I picked up Watch Me Disappear after reading and loving Janelle Brown’s taut, page turning thriller Pretty Things.  I didn’t enjoy Watch Me Disappear nearly as much and it took me a lot longer to finish than it should have, but it was still a decent read with some ideas to ponder.

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487. Nice Try: Stories of Best Intentions and Mixed Results

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Josh Gondelman

Genre:   Memoir, Humor

272 pages, published September 17, 2019

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

Nice Try is a memoir of essays by Emmy Award-winning stand-up comic and humor writer Josh Gondelman.   Dubbed one of comedy’s true “nice guys,” Gondelman recounts stories from his childhood, adolescence, college, making in New York as a comic, dating and getting married.

Quotes 

“But if you’ve got a cheerful, friendly demeanor, people act like you don’t know better, like you’ve never heard of poverty or a broken bone. Optimists never get credit for the effort it takes to keep believing things are going to be okay. Here’s a secret: most optimists know the world is full of horrors. They just think it can be improved.”

 

“I tore through The Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies in elementary school, my pretween brain vibrating with a mixture of titillation and pretension. Ahh, so many swears. Very grown-up, I would think. And Even on an island, I would know it is bad to murder a little boy with glasses, because I am a little boy with glasses.”

 

My Take

There are a few chuckles in Nice Try and Gondelman seems nice enough, but a week after reading it, there was little worth remembering.  The author also gets very preachy at times which was unnecessary and off-putting.

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482. The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Ben and Drue Emerson

Author:   Lindsey Fitzharris

Genre:   Non Fiction, Biography, Science, Medicine, Health

304 pages, published October 31, 2017

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The Butchering Art tells the story of Joseph Lister, a Quaker surgeon in nineteenth-century England and Scotland who solved the riddle of post operative infections.  Drawing from the work of friend Louis Pasteur and his own tireless experimentation, Lister proved germ theory and changed the practice of medicine and saving countless lives.

Quotes 

“The adoption of Lister’s antiseptic system was the most prominent outward sign of the medical community’s acceptance of a germ theory, and it marked the epochal moment when medicine and science merged.”

 

“From the moment he looked through the lens of his father’s microscope to the day he was knighted by Queen Victoria, his life was shaped and influenced by his circumstances and the people around him. Like all of us, he saw his world through the prism of opinions held by those whom he admired most:”

 

“Lister understood that being in a hospital could be a terrifying experience and followed his own golden rule: “Every patient, even the most degraded, should be treated with the same care and regard as though he were the Prince of Wales himself.”

 

“The best that can be said about Victorian hospitals is that they were a slight improvement over their Georgian predecessors. That’s hardly a ringing endorsement when one considers that a hospital’s “Chief Bug-Catcher”—whose job it was to rid the mattresses of lice—was paid more than its surgeons.”

 

“If Lister had nursed any hope that his diligence and reasoned argument concerning his antiseptic system would convert the American audience, he would be sorely disappointed. One attendee accused him of being mentally unhinged and having a “grasshopper in the head.”

 

“Erysipelas was one of four major infections that plagued hospitals in the nineteenth century. The other three were hospital gangrene (ulcers that lead to decay of flesh, muscle, and bone), septicemia (blood poisoning), and pyemia (development of pus-filled abscesses).”

 

“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is almost certainly wrong. —ARTHUR C. CLARKE”

 

“The symptoms syphilis engendered worsened over time. In addition to the unsightly skin ulcers that pockmarked the body in the later stages of the disease, many victims endured paralysis, blindness, dementia, and “saddle nose,” a grotesque deformity that occurs when the bridge of the nose caves into the face. (Syphilis was so common that “no nose clubs” sprang up all over London. One newspaper reported that “an eccentric gentleman, having taken a fancy to see a large party of noseless persons, invited every one thus afflicted, whom he met in the streets, to dine on a certain day at a tavern, where he formed them into a brotherhood.” The man, who assumed the alias of Mr. Crampton for these clandestine parties, entertained his noseless friends every month for a year until his death, at which time the group “unhappily dissolved.”)”

 

“Let us not overlook the further great fact, that not only does science underlie sculpture, painting, music, poetry, but that science is itself poetic.… Those engaged in scientific researches constantly show us that they realize not less vividly, but more vividly, than others, the poetry of their subjects. —HERBERT SPENCER”

 

My Take

I learned a lot about history and medicine from The Butchering Art which focuses on the story of surgeon Joseph Lister and how he demonstrated the role played by germs in causing infections.  Prior to Lister, surgery was a gruesome affair with unsanitary hospitals and many post-operative infections.  We all owe a debt of gratitude to Lister and all of the scientists who were courageous enough to challenge the status quo.

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480. The Dispatcher

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Joni Renee Zalk

Author:   John Scalzi

Genre:   Fiction, Science Fiction, Mystery, Novella

130 pages, published October 4, 2016

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In the not too distant future, it becomes almost impossible to murder anyone.  99.9% of people intentionally killed come back to life.  We don’t know how it happens, but it impacts the human race in unexpected and interesting ways.  Tony Valdez is a Dispatcher, a licensed professional whose job is to humanely dispatch those whose circumstances put them in death’s crosshairs, so they can have a second chance to avoid death, who races the clock to save a fellow who has been kidnapped.

Quotes 

“I don’t look smug.” “You always look smug. You have resting smug face.”

 

“It’s because I remind them they’re not God,” I said. “And that if there is one, I’m closer to Him than they are.”

 

My Take

“I don’t look smug.” “You always look smug. You have resting smug face.”

 

“It’s because I remind them they’re not God,” I said. “And that if there is one, I’m closer to Him than they are.”

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474. The Yellow House

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Julie Horowitz

Author:   Sarah M. Broom

Genre:   Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography, Cultural

376 pages, published August 13, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In The Yellow House, writer Sarah M. Broom tells the stories of her large family of twelve children that lived in and out of mother Ivory Mae’s shotgun house in New Orleans East.  Broom starts in the late 1800’s and concludes with life in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Quotes 

“Distance lends perspective, but it can also shade, misinterpret.”

 

“The mythology of New Orleans—that it is always the place for a good time; that its citizens are the happiest people alive, willing to smile, dance, cook, and entertain for you; that it is a progressive city open to whimsy and change—can sometimes suffocate the people who live and suffer under the place’s burden, burying them within layers and layers of signifiers, making it impossible to truly get at what is dysfunctional about the city.”

 

“Dresses you might wear for special occasions she wore every day. In this way she and Joseph were alike. They dressed to be seen, which is how it came to be that they built up a reputation for floor showing, as Uncle Joe calls it. “Yeah, we knew we looked good.” They danced wherever there was a floor—a bar or a ball. The sidewalk, sometimes. “We used to go in clubs and start dancing from the door. For a poor man I used to dress my can off,” he says. “That’s what used to get me in so much trouble and thing with the ladies.” He and his baby sister, Ivory, would swing it out, jitterbugging and carrying on. Ivory was always fun and always light on her feet. She was especially gifted at being led and men generally loved this quality in her.”

 

“Zora Neale Hurston said, “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

 

“The house’s disappearance from the landscape was not different from my father’s absence. His was a sudden erasure for my mother and siblings, a prolonged and present absence for me, an intriguing story with an ever-expanding middle that never drew to a close. The house held my father inside of it, preserved; it bore his traces. As long as the house stood, containing these remnants, my father was not yet gone. And then suddenly, he was.”

 

“When the house fell down, it can be said, something in me opened up. Cracks help a house resolve internally its pressures and stresses, my engineer friend had said. Houses provide a frame that bears us up. Without that physical structure, we are the house that bears itself up. I was now the house.”

 

“For the longest time, I couldn’t bear to hear his voice. This is such a difficult thing to write, to be that close to someone who you cannot bear to look at, who you are afraid of, who you are worried will hurt you, even inadvertently, especially because you are his family and you will allow him to get away with it.”

 

“That was the story coming out of city hall, the small-print narrative on the full-page advertisements that appeared in glossy local magazines. Except none of these projections would ever come true. New Orleans would not hold steady, not in the least. The city’s population reached its apex in 1960. But no one knew that then.”

 

My Take

Winner of the 2019 National Book Award for non fiction, The Yellow House provides the reader with a unique point of view on New Orleans during the past 40 years and the lives of a large African American family that lived just outside the city in New Orleans East.  While I enjoyed the book, it was a bit meandering and verbose at times.

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