THE FOUR, even though it's just three years old, is slightly outdated but still trenchant

THE FOUR: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google
SCOTT GALLOWAY
Portfolio
$13.99 eBook platforms, available now

Rating:

The Publisher Says: The acclaimed NYU business professor's tour-de-force on the true nature of technology's titans, and what happens next in their struggle to dominate our lives.

Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook are in an unprecedented race towards a $1 trillion valuation--and whoever gets there first will exert untold influence over our economy, public policy, and consumer behavior. How did these four become so successful? How high can they continue to rise? Does any other company stand a chance of competing?

To these questions and more, acclaimed NYU / Stern professor Scott Galloway brings bracing answers. In his highly provocative first book, he pulls back the curtain on exactly how Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google built their massive empires. While the media spins tales about superior products and designs, and the power of technological innovation, Galloway exposes the truth about these "Four Horsemen":

- None of these four are first movers technologically; they've either copied, stolen, or acquired their ideas.
- Each company uses evolutionary psychology to appeal to our basest instincts: Amazon, our need to hunt and gather; Apple, our need to procreate; Facebook, our need for love; and Google, our need for a God.
- These companies are uniquely successful at leveraging competitive advantage built by digital and then protected by analog moats, from an empire of retail stores (Apple) to the world's most efficient physical distribution network (Amazon.)

Through analysis that's both rigorous and entertaining, Galloway outlines the path for the next trillion-dollar company (the Fifth Horseman) and points to which companies are in the running. (Uber, sure; less obvious, Microsoft and Starbucks.) As with Peter Thiel's Zero to One, readers will come away with fresh, game-changing insights about what it takes to win in today's economy.

My Review:

THE LISTENER AND OTHER STORIES, a neglected...forgotten, really...midcentury writer's collection

THE LISTENER and Other Stories
HELEN HUDSON
E.P. Dutton
Out of print; various prices

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Time magazine called Helen Hudson's first novel, Tell the Time to None, "a clean-cut gem of a novel." The New York Times Book Review said, "Miss Hudson is a gifted writer; and she is to be welcomed."

Now in these thirteen stories Miss Hudson demonstrates again her remarkable ability to be at once satirically incisive and compassionate, to delineate the human being while exposing the irony of the human scene.

Many of her stories deal with solemn themes, but even the most somber of them is enlivened by her unexpected wit, the swift, wicked similes of her observations. Hers is prose for everyone who delights in the language.

Above all, these are character studies in which the individuality of her creations is vivid. The stories are frequently both poignant and astringent, for Helen Hudson presents such contrasting pictures of her characters that she is able to evoke sympathy even for those she reveals most completely.

THIS BOOK WAS INHERITED FROM MY MOTHER. THANKS, MAMA.

My Review: I love discovering new-to-me writers. When my mother died in 1999, she had in her downsized library a large selection of midcentury writers whose oeuvres are largely forgotten today...Sloan Wilson, John P. Marquand, Harry Golden...many of which I've managed to retain over my own peregrinations.

Three of Miss Helen Hudson's books, this one, Tell the Time to None, and Meyer Meyer, were there as well. There they sat ignored by me for literal decades. I paid them no mind but liked the Sixties aesthetic of their jackets. Then I was at a lovely, long-gone bookstore in Austin, Texas, browsing the bizarre and eclectic collection of modern, current, and antiquitous books its truly weird owner had accreted. There was a short-story anthology called New Voices, '64...and since a forty-year-old selection of "new voices" is bound to be fascinating, it came home with me.

Helen Hudson's story, A Bottle of Sherry to Dr. Polk, was in that anthology. I read it with complete pleasure, a real sense of knowing this main character and the support staff making her life possible, and the acerbic nature of the lady's humor (I speak of both author and character):

“...And where's Margaret Pier? I know she's not dead, even if she's almost as old as I am and twice as stubborn."

"She said she'd never set foot inside this house again. Not after what you said the last time."

"Did I say something dreadful?"

"You said blind Republicanism like hers was an inherited social disease, like syphilis. You said it. I heard you myself.”

My very own soul-mother, is Mrs. Pritchard. I love that and I love her and I realized that thank goodness I had the whole collection to read! I was chuffed. I was also mid-upheaval in my life, and the project of reading and reviewing the collection fell by the wayside. I added the book to my online catalogs in 2011 and found again the quote above, and another below, from Dr. Polk; what a delight! More personal-life upheavals followed in fairly short order; the read-n-review project got shelved (heh) again.

I follow a blog called Neglected Books and have since goodness-knows. I've found many a forgotten tome to enjoy, notably the now-well-known classic Missouri novel The Moonflower Vine that the blog helped rehabilitate. I have a list of amazing authors I'd thought of mentioning to Blogger Brad Bigelow over time, but never did for a huge variety of reasons. Well, I did it this year, and the author was Helen Hudson.

She was the big sis of Encyclopedia Brown's creator, Donald Sobol. They were products of the Depression-era left-wing Jewish world of the Bronx. It shows in Author Hudson's frequent forays into the world of social-justice fiction, most notably in her last two novels (1971's Farnsbee South and the delightful Criminal Trespass from 1985); she's also the editor of a 2002 charity anthology called Dinner at Six: Voices from the Soup Kitchen, which I possess but haven't read. Her desire to strike a blow against mindless conformity and unquestioning acceptance of the status quo is the thread that tied together all of her work that I've read, and I suspect all that I haven't yet.

For all who, like me, remember when Kirkus Reviews hated everything except the very, very best work, I reproduce here their assessment of The Listener and Other Stories:

Marking, but not necessarily wasting, time while waiting for an appropriate successor to Miss Hudson's fine novel Meyer (sic) (1966), these stories read like probing a dying nerve–a series of nasty jabs compulsively sought. In spite of the energetic manipulations to mystify and terrify—somehow you keep on reading. The title story details the psychiatric career of a bloodless doctor whose imperviousness drives his patients to death and ruin, until he is finally pierced at once by the cries of his patients and quits his profession. There is a jovial undertaker whose love for his work is unappreciated by a grieving couple: a suburban matron who is shockingly lured to death by a shuffling old woman whose affiliation is suspect; a suicide who had touched the lives of his neighbors; a large unloving lady haunted by the masculine spirit of rising walls; an elderly man who leads a phantom congregation as a Jewish temple is destroyed. Three of the stories deal with less eccentric matters, among them the bitter career of an exploited Negro housekeeper. Perhaps Miss Hudson needs the novel form for a deeper and more liberal probe of people as well as circumstance. However these are diverting exercises if the Glance Macabre is for you.

The Glance Macabre (love that phrase!) being very much for me, off I go! Of course, I'll make my customary comments à la Bryce Method.

The Listener couldn't be more 1967 (the year The Virginia Quarterly first published it) with its free association and celebration of analysis. Dr. Toye's enormous ears and absence of personality make him the caricature analyst, silent and open to the shrieks and moans of the needy. Then in comes a man with a seriously unexamined life; a man with hidden desires and a wife who bores him out of his mind; and Dr. Toye listens him into an early grave. The long dark night of Dr. Toye's soul has begun.

He spent his life in his house, downstairs during the day and upstairs at night, and never went out to lunch. For the truth was that he was happy only in his office, sitting upright behind his desk with a body stretched out on his couch and a voice talking just to him.

Born too soon, our Dr. Toye. He should be among us now. 4.5 stars

Sunday Mourning reveals the deep fissures in lives struck by tragedy. An undertaker, an unhappy profession to be sure, grows accustomed to death; but the living left in its wake are a fresh, painful disappointment every day. This isn't a story so much as a beautiful observation of three people in extremis.

Mr. Hawley, the undertaker, was a big man with a tweed jacket and seat in the New Hampshire legislature.
–and–
She was a small scrawny woman with a round little mouth shaped to hold a straw, as though she took life in tiny sips.

No one is less prepared for death than a parent is for their child's. Author Hudson had no illusions about how pain destroys identity. She was able to reassure us that there is still restoration and rebuilding after its ravages. 3.5 stars

The Strange Testament of Michael Cassidy examines the weird, frictionless life of a casually anti-Semitic, racist Catholic whose Jewish neighbors he has never failed to serve in his grocery store. He detests and despises Maureen, his crass and hateful wife though he shares her prejudices in his quiet way. This being the 1960s, though, Cassidy is caught in an ugly war between tradition and modernity that we called "urban renewal" or "slum clearance" then; today its successor is the less obviously offensive "gentrification." Ghastly Maureen will go to her ghastly sister in Kansas; Cassidy will not. He remains in the old homeplace. Where will he live?

...he discovered the temple, though he did not realize, at first, what it was, merely a huge old building empty and silent, surrounded by gaps, and left to rot in the rain. He found a side door unlocked as if for him, a sanctuary of silence for a man whose head was a drum for the world to beat.

His quiet-man act at last rewarded with silence! Until, one day, the past comes calling with its one unshirkable responsibility. 4 stars

The Hungry Eye belongs, in a roundabout way, to Michèle, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Paris. Her life is blighted by the unfashionable size of her, at a time and in a place where "petite" was de rigueur and "mignon" was not just a modifier for expensive filet. She has lived the most useless imaginable life; she does nothing, causes nothing, cares for nothing but herself. This is the most New Yorkery story I've read by Author Hudson, and still it manages to be truly bitterly angry about the waste and uselessness of "the ladies who lunch." In the end, what I found silly and what displeased me was the silent chorus, the personified self-image that takes up the story's space the way Michèle takes up her bijou little apartment. A disappointed 3.5 stars, all for the off-kilter eroticism of sexless voyeuristic intentions.

Send a Patrol Car to Spartanburg isn't even a little bit subtle in its accusation of cruelty by neglect in a racist society. Mattie Burns isn't in control of anything about her life, she works for the Lovings (get it?) and when I say "works" I mean it literally. Scrub, polish, well let Author Hudson tell you:

{Mattie} had worked for the Lovings for years, ever since their first child and their first move. They had lived on the third floor of a narrow, surly little frame house that pinched and squeezed at every turn, its windows fixed intently on the slums creeping up slowly two and a half blocks away. Mattie had carried the garbage can up and down three flights of stairs and piled most of the furniture out the back door when guests came. The Lovings paid her the standard minimum wage, even though "domestics" were not included in the law, and she scrubbed and swept and waxed and polished and hung out the wash, sitting on the toilet seat and leaning out the third-floor window, which, her friends warmed her, was dangerous for a woman with her "pressure."

But Mattie can't just quit, there's brother Clifford's pills to buy and administer, there's her own home to clean, there's the whole world waiting on an old black woman to bend her back and get after it. Zora Neale Hurston said, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, "De nigger woman is de mule uh de world." Mattie would agree, I will just bet. 4 stars because it appeared in Mademoiselle magazine in 1966 and how Author Hudson managed to storm that bastion of privilege with this angry story beggars my paltry imagination.

Hermes' Beard chronicles the Greek adventures of Arleene and Gerald, American (of course) tourists (of course) whose entire lives are summed up in the one moment when Arleene (!) says to herself, "Gerald was right about everything." And how horrible it was that he dared to be right about everything since the trip was her idea. And how much she detests his big, American size and his German-speaking communication with the locals (remembering this is a mere 20 years after the Nazi occupation of Greece) and, well, him. All of him. She even resents the fact that he dared to be right about the Hermes of Praxiteles being less impressive than the archaic statue, Hermes Kriophoros, whose beard we have all seen in our art history course texts.

In short, the sheer unadulterated bliss of marriage. Whiny meets overbearing, neither side "wins" because it's a draw as to who's the more awful wretch. 4 stars


A Bottle of Sherry to Dr. Polk details the last moments of independence that a starchy matriarch, Mrs. George Pritchard (Emma), as she prepares...is prepared...to move into a nursing home since her advancing dementia will no longer allow her not to be constantly supervised. She hasn't lost her self yet, though one can sense its inevitability:

“Frankie," she said softly, "do you know what my idea of heaven is? A place where the windows are always clean, and the people I want can always come to dinner.”

Her long-time day nurse receives the confidence with stoic, understated unhappiness; an older man with rather too much experience dealing with dementia-suffering souls, I was deeply and sadly affected by the story, by the sense that it gave me of Author Hudson's intimate knowledge of her material. I give it 5 stars

After Cortés goes there with the anti-Catholic rhetoric:

...the humiliation of his spirit was the worst of all. He felt no Father to this slovenly, loose-lipped flock. It pained him to force his mind to meet theirs, to reduce the intricacy and beauty and mystery of Catholic dogma to the simple act and the blunt command, like limiting Hamlet to its plot. He read late at night, and since there was no one with whom to share his thoughts, he took them to Mexico each summer. There the mating of mind and eye helped to carry him through the next winter.

Mexico's long-famous tradition of anticlericalism, and its openly syncretic species of Catholicism, make Father Charles Cheney feel anonymous enough to wear a flowered shirt and khakis in place of the collar and rigmarole he trudges through his East Bronx life in. While approaching Chichén Itzá he meets Carla, a tourist from LA and one of the California types that's so effin' irritating you want to slap them goodbye before they plummet over a handy cliff: the "free spirit" who makes no plan, reserves no room, brings only what money they have and then sponges and mooches and wheedles their way around wherever it is they land. To be fair, these people are from everywhere, but the American entitlement of the Carlas of California is extra grating. Father Cheney does his damnedest (!) to unscrape his unwanted acquaintance, wishing all manner of uncharitable things on the Mormon missionaries and the rich Texans who stay in his hotel. He even devises a subterfuge to avoid them all: He will get up at five-thirty to see the ruins and be on his way back to Mexico City before they drag themselves out of bed! But Gawd, in her merciless pitiless cruelty, will not have any such pleasure doled out to her priest. Oh no indeed. 4 stars for the glorious gall-and-wormwood ending.

The Tenant expresses the tragedy of one who is simply not meant for this world.

After it happened, the neighbors all said they'd always known there was something queer about Mr. Markham...{b}ut at the time, Mr. Markham was merely a pale, thin man in a gray suit and a narrow tie who lived in the attic with his wife; he was a good-looking man, though his face seemed, somehow, more like a slightly smudged copy than the real thing. ... They never learned where he was from. They only knew that he did not seem to belong here. He had the terrible courtesy of the permanent guest.

People like Mr. Markham, who married the lazy but competent Mrs. Markham despite the fact that she was not pretty or witty or anything except devoted and grateful that he noticed her, aren't really of the Earth still less any specific location on it. That was Mrs. Markham's job. Her life changed when their money ran out. He wasn't fit for anything practical so she went to get food for the table. He drifted. He took jobs and left or lost them in no time at all. He wore holes in his shoes trying to make the world give him a space, and still he couldn't.

It's a very sad tale, but one I'll bet you any money there's a face attached to in your mind's eye already. Most of us know a Markham, a man or woman who simply...can't. This one, Author Hudson conjured a caring and devoted mate for and that makes the inevitable end so much more poignant. 4 stars

The Road to Kingswood stars an old-country woman, elderly, with "feet like hooves" in her sensible black oxfords meant for walking, walking, walking, trying to sell greeting cards to people who did not want or need to greet anyone with a cheap preprinted card. Mrs. Harrington, soignée widow of Hank, dreads this apparition appearing on her doorstep. As soon as she opens the door to get rid of her, the worst of her nightmares comes true. The slightly sweaty old thing squats at her kitchen table, demanding a glass of water then a ride to the bus stop...and at every turn, Mrs. Harrington (née Butt, of Myrtle Avenue, Flatbush) fails every test of common decency and courtesy. She wants the untidy creature out of her nine-room home with its two-hundred-year-old furniture! Why should she drive the always-walking woman to the bus stop when she got here by herself?

The gods disapprove of selfishness. The road to the burial ground awaits us all, but when and how are the unknowns. 4 stars

Strange Fare goes in a hack for the last, long ride with a stranger. A cabbie becomes Charon; a man whose Earthly days are done hails him and begs to be taken home.

How funny it is when someone you don't know needs more than you can imagine giving. 3.5 stars

An Appointment with Armstrong joins a used-up, useless old academic, a relic of a day gone forever, as he is once again about to be ritually humiliated in his quest for the final accolade once bestowed upon Professors: tenure. He is summoned to his department head's office for an eleven-thirty meeting, and of course readies himself to go promptly. He moves through his solitary home, once shared with a woman he never saw fade out of her prime in deepening despair and disappointment.

It seemed ages now since Louise had died, leaving him all alone with the empty years flapping about him. But it was only last fall when Death had crept round and round the house like a starved cat. Nursing Louise, he had known it was there, though he kept the doors closed and the shades drawn against it. Louise had known too, and accepted it, even welcomed it after the long years of illness. She stopped noting the days or the hours; forgot to remind him to leave the laundry out on Thursdays or pay the cleaning woman on Fridays or get her medicine. She merely lay quietly with her eyes closed in the darkened room under the mound of blankets, as though she could no longer wait and had made her own grave and settled herself in it.

Author Hudson knew that woman, I'm sure, and knew the husband whose failure to launch was more caustic to her than to him. Her life ended in a heap of leftover shreds; his potters along as it always has, as he always was and so is today. The ice between them wasn't visible to him and was lethal to her. The meeting with Armstrong, we know from the moment the subject is broached, will never happen and nothing will change until the day this dry, pointless man's largely unused heart stops. 4 stars for the savagery of Author Hudson's hatred sheathed in such an elegant way.

Thy Servant is another one of Author Hudson's angry screeds against the religious among us for their terrible, two-faced judgmental ways. Suzie is coming to be housekeeper for Mr. and Mrs.Gillespie and their SEVEN daughters (but they aren't Catholic!), just until her husband's hitch in the Army is over. Suzie is a perfect fit for the family, omnicompetent, overdriven to achieve, and as the oldest of thirteen (Catholic) children accustomed to enforcing discipline.

Except...what do you know...her perfection is, while not an act, just the opening act of an emotional Grand Guignol that is Single White Female meets Hazel. The story is utterly chilling. It's devastating in its judgements of the Gillespies as layabouts and Suzie as Torquemada in Mother Teresa's weeds. This is the most even-handed hatchet job that's been done outside of a murder scene. And the best part is there is no one except a seven-year-old child who witnesses the entire unwinding of these grave-cloths. We're not treated to overheated emotional scenes, we're given the simple and unadorned facts the way a kid sees the world and then, mirabile dictu, the kid survives the crash without so much as a scrape! 4 stars

Fine farewell to Author Hudson's world. È finita la commedia per ora.

YOU EXIST TOO MUCH, Queer Palestinian girl finds out how her world works...then says "BYE NOW"

YOU EXIST TOO MUCH
ZAINA ARAFAT
Catapult
$26.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: On a hot day in Bethlehem, a twelve-year-old Palestinian American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem forbidden, and their judgement will echo on through her adolescence. When our narrator finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother’s response only intensifies a sense of shame: “You exist too much,” she tells her daughter.

Told in vignettes that flash between the United States and the Middle East—from New York to Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine—Zaina Arafat’s debut novel traces her protagonist’s progress from blushing teen to sought-after DJ and aspiring writer. In Brooklyn, she moves into an apartment with her first serious girlfriend and tries to content herself with their comfortable relationship. But soon her longings, so closely hidden during her teenage years, explode out into reckless romantic encounters and obsessions with other people. Her desire to thwart her own destructive impulses will eventually lead her to The Ledge, an unconventional treatment center that identifies her affliction as “love addiction.” In this strange, enclosed society she will start to consider the unnerving similarities between her own internal traumas and divisions and those of the places that have formed her.

Opening up the fantasies and desires of one young woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities, You Exist Too Much is a captivating story charting two of our most intense longings—for love and a place to call home.

I RECEIVED A DRC OF THIS BOOK FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The frustrations of being Othered by virtue of being your own self are not fresh ground to till. Eternally fertile ground growing evergreen crops, though not fresh. I read this book twice and that is a rare occurrence for me, at my age and with my TBR approaching mid-four figures. The reason I decided that I needed a second trip through the book was simple: I was so completely shattered by the honest and vulnerable story Author Arafat tells, a story that could with only minor tweaks be my own, that I didn't trust my opinion-forming ability. I was too close, too in the moment, to feel remotely analytical.

Start with the beginning, an anecdote from the US-raised narrator's childhood visit to her "homeland":

It occurred to me in that moment to question why, as a man, his bare legs were somehow less troubling than mine. It was a double standard, a shame I had simply accepted until then. I must've done something wrong. In acquiring my gender, I had become offensive.

As though a young girl's walking apparatus could somehow be unacceptable! "Haram" or "forbidden" the old religious nuts shout at her. Among the many, many reasons I find religions and religious beliefs offensive in the extreme is the insanity of accepting that your being, whatever part of it the religious don't happen to like, is unacceptable, nay offensive, to the god they claim made you. But Author Arafat reclaims the space:

Ambiguity was an unsettling yet exhilarating space.

I don't inhabit an ambiguous space, being bearded and so American in appearance that, in other countries, American tourists glom onto me for help dealing with the foreignness of their presence in wherever. But there's that inner thing, the queerness, that never, ever quite stays unnoticed. And that is probably why Author Arafat notices with such keenness that her ability to get by with chicanery is such excellent camouflage. It becomes an addicition, in fact. It's easy for someone like me, who also had a borderline personality disordered mother, to relate to her need, her survival-level desire, to camouflage, hide, obfuscate, not say the truth:

I could think of nothing more shameful—why was I doing this to her? At the time I thought the same thing: she should have had better. She didn't deserve this at all.
–and–
"I don't care what you choose to do anymore," she said, and I crumbled. I needed her to care. Worse than anger was indifference.

Didn't deserve what, having a queer child? She's the one who's fucked up for making it such a huge stinkin' deal. Mother Abu Sa'ab and her utter inability to see people not herself as real, fully formed human beings with valid needs. Her child's needs are only seen as demands on her, unfair unjust "what did I do to deserve this?!" impositions. Affection is a conditional gift, not a right...not even a privilege. So Laila Abu Sa'ab, beautiful mother of a plain daughter who is awkward, unpolished, generally not like her, sets the stage for innumerable false trails her (always unnamed, this is all first-person present tense narration so she doesn't need to identify herself) child will follow:

I imagined she was judging me in that moment. I'm familiar with that judgment, after years of anorexia. I was past it by then, but still, how could I eat something so unsexy as a cheeseburger in front of the sexiest woman in the universe?
–and–
I was in between post-anorexia plump and all-night double sets, with no snack breaks—what if she didn't like my body? My mother had recently impersonated me, puffing up her cheeks and holding out her arms beyond her stomach like an ape.

Ah, the addict's favorite crutch: "{object} won't love me if..." and then the spiral goes down from there. "My image is only safe when others are at a safe distance!" and the distance, unsurprisingly, never gets smaller so the isolation becomes unbearable and the addiction comes back and "{object} won't love me now!" lather rinse repeat. It's inevitable. A mother without compassion plus a nature unacceptable to her world (the world, if I'm honest) can't be expected to create any other kind of result.

Then her girlfriend, four years of wondering what the hell is going on inside her partner's head, takes advantage of the narrator's absence to do the stupid, unforgivable thing that almost everyone does: She snoops. Reads emails not meant for her eyes. Be careful, partners, about this behavior. If you discover things that hurt you, no one is to blame but you yourself. "It's better to know!" rises the cry...and I say, "you already knew or you wouldn't have snooped." Anna snoops. Anna finds a mountain of lying and cheating. Bad Anna.

The last line was the hardest to read, the one that made my throat burn: "Maybe one day you'll learn you can't treat people with such disregard. Even yourself."

I get why Anna wrote that, I really do, but that's the nastiest and most judgmental formulation of the truth she could've spun up. This is why the snooping behavior is so toxic. The self-righteousness of Being Right is insufferable and makes those addicts to it very unpleasant people. But the hurt Anna caused did catalyze the narrator to go on a search for help:

Google had informed me that a woman named Pia Mellody ... was the foremost expert on love addiction. She sounded like a character out of a self-help fairy tale; I pictured her with a tiara and a wand.

So did I. Not in a good way, either. These sorts of judgmental sunshine-enema-givers make me itch. "Love addiction"? Really. Addicted to the endorphin rush but short on follow-through, in my never-remotely-humble opinion. But off our narrator goes to this summer camp for the love-addicted. And runs smack into her anorexia anxiety:

I was too uncomfortable to eat, especially {burger buns} that looked like the cotton stuffing inside of furniture.

Why I throw the buns away and get real bread to put around my home-brought fast food burgers. This place is a sham, and the food is the first warning. But the twenty-eight days are crucial to getting to grips with the out-of-control anxiety the narrator suffers.

I don't want to spoiler the extremely moving ending. I don't think I can take you any farther into the text without running that risk. Suffice it to say that, for me, the beating heart of the book is anxiety and anger, an intergenerational gift from all the parts of the narrator's past from before she was born:

At the time I didn't realize what it was that separated the two sides of my family: that my paternal cousins did not live in the noisy neighborhood, go to the community pool, and wait to eat hummus sandwishes at home by choice.

What makes people from mismatched backgrounds think their marriages will work? Expectations unmet are more caustic than acid rain and do their damage just as devastatingly but far more quickly. Judgment is *lethal* to marital (any relationship, really) harmony and inevitable between the parties to an up/down marriage. And it is the gift that keeps on giving, passing to children and fucking them up royally. Add to this mental illness on one side, emotional deprivation and class consciousness on the other, and one gets this sad story of a woman facing the world with a raincoat and a butter knife when she needs a scuba suit and a spear-gun.

I was powerfully moved by this read. I identified with this young woman's pathology and her ancestry, although I'm not ethnically Arab or Palestinian or anything else the US looks down on. I totally understand misgendering and omitting details about one's significant others. Being situationally out, being "reserved" (the polite self-lie for "closeted"), being unable to see past the mountain of unworthy feelings that we stand under, behind, below.

She sought healing, our narrator did; I have as well; and I hope anyone who reads this book (I hope there will be many, many of you) can and will seek healing as well.

THE BRIGHTEST PLACE IN THE WORLD, facts made into fiction to tell The Truth

THE BRIGHTEST PLACE IN THE WORLD
DAVID PHILIP MULLINS
University of Nevada Press
$24.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Inspired by true events, The Brightest Place in the World traces the lives of four characters haunted by an industrial disaster. On an ordinary sunny morning in 2012, a series of explosions level a chemical plant on the outskirts of Las Vegas. The shock waves are felt as far away as Fremont Street. Homes and businesses suffer broken windows and caved-in roofs. Hundreds are injured, and eight employees of the plant are unaccounted for, presumed dead.

One of the missing is maintenance technician Andrew Huntley, a husband and father who is an orbital force in the novel as those who loved him grapple with his loss. Andrew’s best friend, Russell Martin—an anxiety-plagued bartender who calms his nerves with a steady inflow of weed—misses him more than he might a brother. Meanwhile Emma, Russell’s wife—a blackjack dealer at a downtown casino—tries to keep her years-long affair with Andrew hidden. Simon Addison, a manager at the plant who could have saved Andrew’s life, is afflicted by daily remorse, combined with a debilitating knowledge of his own cowardice. And then there’s Maddie, Andrew’s only child, a model high-school student whose response to the tragedy is to experiment with shoplifting and other deviant behavior.

Against the sordid backdrop of Las Vegas—and inspired by the PEPCON disaster of May 4, 1988—this engaging novel is a story of grief and regret, disloyalty and atonement, infatuation and love.

THE PUBLISHER PROVIDED ME WITH A DRC AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU.

My Review: When disaster occurs, sudden and unexpected and yet limited in scope, all those caught in its extent are changed. Almost all of us has had this experience. As one ages, it's a given that it's occurred more than once...and it never, ever gets easier or routinized. The emotional toll is different each time, and there are certain practical responses that kick in with habituation (eg, people always gotta eat, so bring a casserole). But the effect is always profound, transformative, and painful. (I've spoken to many people who've had happy calamities, eg childbirth, who express surprise at how much it hurts to alter one's life, habits, friend-circle.)

One fine day, Las Vegas, Nevada, is the epicenter of a small seismic event. There are seismometers that record the Richter-scale measurement (for us oldsters; younger folk will call it the moment magnitude measurement abbreviated Mw); but it takes a novelist to record the magnitude of the moments after the event. Author David Philip Mullins, associate professor of English at Omaha's Jesuit institution Creighton University, took that on and has done a fine job of showing how a deadly explosion cracks much more than land and buildings.

Andrew works for manager Simon at a chemical plant outside Las Vegas. The plant's aging; the community isn't enthusiastic about its presence at all—what was once the edge of town isn't anymore—and there are no corporate plans for moving it because, if the desert of a sparsely populated state isn't excited enough to have the jobs, what's a nicer place going to think? Heck, these ingrates are even iffy about the nearby marshmallow plant! (Who wants to live with the eternal scent of S'mores on the breeze? Yuck.) But Andrew has a wife, Juliet, and a high-school senior daughter, Maddie, to support. He goes to work; he worries about safety, sure, but groceries don't buy themselves. And his bestest bud ever, Russell, tends bar nearby, so he has a safe atmosphere to relax in before going home to his womenfolk.

Russell isn't quite there in the womenfolk department, having his One True Love, poker-dealing wife Emma to go home to but no kids. Not that she, or he, wants a kid. Russell is prey to anxiety and self-worth issues he medicates with (then still illegal) pot. He keeps himself to himself outside the bar, relying on Andrew and Emma to provide his social needs. He loves them both...he loves Maddie like a niece...he likes Juliet just fine. His life is, then, jogging along smoothly enough. And that's where Author Mullins places us in his first scene, this fine day we know is going to be all about change:

The glare of a mid-morning sun gives the interstate a kind of waxen luster that almost blinds him if he pays attention to it. An odor of exhaust permeates the atmosphere of his little sedan, charter buses and eighteen-wheelers making canyons of the lanes.

Beautiful evocation of an unlovely reality...how perfect that Russell is the one noticing. Because Russell is a man whose world explodes in so many ways when he hears a huge explosion, sees roiling smoke rising, from the driver's seat.

Maddie is in school when the explosion cracks her world wide open. She is called to the office, and some well-meaning Charlie Brown-trumpeting adults do what they can to inform her of her life, for real not for drama, being over. It does not compute. How could it? No one is prepared for death, not really, and still less a young woman with pressing life decisions...schools, majors...to make. Her well-loved father? There every day, and now you say he's what?

A chitalpa tree shaped like a tuning fork grows from a brick-edged plot in the concrete. Fat pink flowers droop from the branches, the petals like stockings hung to dry.

What a grieving young woman, suddenly not going to be her father's daughter anymore, will notice:

It's a Chitalpa tashkentensis, a drought-hardy blooming big shrub/small tree, and its pinkness does rather look like laundry left on the line to droop in the blasting, battering sunshine. I can see it standing out enough against the general dun-colored desert landscape and Las Vegas's stunted, dun-colored ordinary buildings to make it snag the eye of a deeply shocked and still numb young person.

Someone who has experienced a sudden and unexpected loss will recognize the pattern of fixating on a trivial, familiar object, something that grounds you in the present; then Maddie does something else predictable but that will always catch others by surprise. She responds to the authority figures urging her to stay there, to stay safe in their minds, by rebelling. She knows she should stay put but she can't. She has to move, so she aims herself at the place that's changed the most. Home.

Home means Mom, Juliet, the widow. And the house. The ravaged house that they quite clearly can't live in for a while. Can they even conceive of what it will take to fix the house? Let alone their lives, their new and now forever changed lives–plural. One of the first things to go when a parent dies is the older child's existing relationship to the surviving parent. It simply evaporates. It sometimes takes a minute for the parties to realize that it's evaporated, though:

Crunching glass as she circled the living room in her heels, her mother raved about the explosions in a manner that seemed to belong to an actress from one of the old movies they always show on AMC and Showtime: Meryl Streep or Glenn Close.

Feeling old yet? Old movies with Glenn Close? Wait, what? Old movies have Bette Davis in them, not the divine Miss Close or Miss Streep! *sigh* But that's the least of the changes wrought by this day, the opening of the age gulf. Juliet, a closet smoker, offers Maddie a cigarette from her frozen-food-concealed stash.

BAD JULIET. NO NO NO! This awful misjudgment will, in the end, cause some repercussions that no one could've foreseen....

But families come in flavors, the biological and the logical. Russell, let us not forget, is grieving his all-but-brother Andrew. He and Emma go to eat after the spiffy obsequies of Andrew's bodyless memorial, as Juliet has neither house to host, nor inclination to feed, the attendees of Andrew's service. Andrew was the one responsible for Emma noticing Russell in the first place! He was so central to Russell's happiness with his low-friction life. He asked Emma for her number at Andrew's behest...he and Emma included Andrew in their bar-centered socializing, far less often Juliet...are y'all's alarm bells ringing yet? Mine were...and here's Emma speaking to Russell about Andrew's death over their post-service meal:

"How can a person go away forever? Here and then not here—it doesn't compute."
"I know," Russell says.
"None of it makes any sense."
"None of it does."
"I just wish..."
"What," he says.
"It's like he vanished. It defies...I don't know. Logic. No warning, no nothing. It's so crazy to me."

Tearful bewilderment over your husband's bestie's death? C'mon! Everybody knows what time it is now! Except poor Russell. He's miffed she's hogging the spotlight that rightfully is his over his (he thinks) greater loss. Oh Russell...

And there's also the pink Victoria's Secret slip Russell once came across while looking in her closet for a spare hangar—he's never seen her wear it. She's rarely in the mood for sex anyway, and when she is, or pretends to be, she puts forth a bored, lazy effort that fills him with shame and makes the whole thing reek of an obligation.

DUDE!! There is as of that instant NO excuse for not being sure that you're not her main squeeze, just her husband. And c'mon, you have to know who is. It's too painful to admit to yourself? Good gawd, man, what's worse: Knowing but not saying, or saying and ending things? The crisis is reached and Russell, happily hazy superannuated bartender Russell, has to jump. Which way?

But strangest of all is the case of Manager Simon. His secret is revealed early in the book. It explains, but doesn't excuse, a lot of the truly skeevy shit he pulls...but I ain't a-tellin'. His life is farther along its trajectory than the other characters' lives are.

Simon thinks with sadness of {his two college-student children's} recent entry into adulthood, youth fluttering behind them like a shirt taken off on a windy beach.

An image that captivates me. And a very sad thing to experience as a parent; also exhilarating, liberating, terrifying on so many levels. (One thing no one tells you about adulthood is that you never, ever have an unmixed emotion after it really kicks in.) His managerhood, his whole career, is sloughing off like skin from a nasty burn. He feels so awful about his character as it's been revealed to him. He makes a concerted effort to Do Something positive, helpful, kind. Juliet's house is a disaster! Her yardwork needs doing...I'll go do it. And while I'm at it, I'll just...improve...the landscaping....

It is, I'm sad to say, a misfire.

He doesn't peep in her windows at night—nothing like that. He doesn't own any binoculars, and he's never taken a photo of her. Simon gets no sexual pleasure from spying on Juliet. He isn't a criminal or a pervert.
–followed by–
"Stay," Juliet says, looking at him now. "Please."

Okay...I get that she's wildly flailing for solid ground after her entire existence is savaged by disaster. But she's just poured richly merited contumely on his head while *sitting*down*to*coffee* with him...we're already stretching my credulity a bit too far...but then she asks him to stay when he's prepared to do the right thing at last and leave her alone?!?

So. There it is...alone. Is that enough to explain this lunatic, irresponsible behavior?

This is a seriously squicky moment, and I was losing my sense of trust in Author Mullins. Another troubling, though seriously less so, event comes as Russell essentially carries off his minor not-really-niece for an impromptu camping trip a good way away from Vegas. (I'm shouting at the screen at this point, "CALL YOUR MOTHER YOU SIMPLETON! EVEN IF YOUR IDIOT FAKE-UNCLE'S TOO HIGH TO DO IT!" Luckily, Russell isn't that stupid and leaves Juliet a message or I'd've chucked this book at the wall.) At least nothing heinous can happen while they're together.

Juliet has such a rough road in this story, trouble from every angle. Dead husband, adolescent daughter going through some serious problems, family issues with Russell (the cops? really?), and for goodness sake this whole Simon thing! But here's the problem, Juliet: You're your own worst enemy. Like everyone else in the world, right? And what Juliet gets herself up to is the most gigantically reactive response to death a person can have. It's *almost* too much, but I know from experience how very real it is.

Author Mullins is a debut novelist, though no stranger to writing. His first book, Greetings from Below, won the 2009 Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction and was published by Sarabande Books in the US, Salt Publishing in the Commonwealth countries after winning the 2010 International Walter Scott Prize for Short Stories. His stories, then, have attracted attention and praise; stories operate on a different emotional logic than do novels. It is that sense of mismatched logic that is the source of my missing half-star rating. The novel I've reviewed is unquestionably a novel and the writing is high quality. I'm still left, however, with some lingering longings, some unmet needs for novel characters to develop. This isn't a family saga, so I wasn't hoping for the history of the participants. This isn't a Bildungsroman, so I wasn't expecting a central PoV character to Develop and Change. But as a novel of relationships and their mutability under pressure, I wanted the people to make their choices and cause their changes.

Even in the aftermath of a catastrophe, choices and changes can be occasions for characters to take control, exercise agency, and the people we follow around Las Vegas and environs are curiously acted upon and not acting. This is completely understandable in the first half of the book, as the ripples of the disaster propagate. It is increasingly troublesome for me as the novel progresses.

The point of going on this trip is to see sights you haven't before so I will leave the ending to your private reading. I've given you samples of the phrases I was particularly fond of. The vague wanting I experienced for more directed action is not remotely enough to have me encourage you skip the read! In fact, I encourage you to do the deed, buy the book, and ride the shockwave of this explosion. It is a rewarding experience.

THE DEVIL IN AMERICA, one of Kai Ashante Williams's deep & disturbing novellas

THE DEVIL IN AMERICA
KAI ASHANTE WILSON
Tor.com free online or 99¢ Kindle edition

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Scant years after the Civil War, a mysterious family confronts the legacy that has pursued them across centuries, out of slavery, and finally to the idyllic peace of the town of Rosetree. The shattering consequences of this confrontation echo backwards and forwards in time, even to the present day.

My Review: This 2014 novelette by the author of A Taste of Honey and The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps was nominated for a Nebula Award, a Locus Award, a Shirley Jackson Award, and a World Fantasy Award. I see why. What isn't as readily imaginable is why it didn't sweep them all...

Ma’am might be a challenge to love sometimes, but respect came easy.
–and–
He was a father who loved his daughter, but he was a husband first and foremost. I’m a terrible thirsty man, Pa had said once, and your mama is my only cool glass of water in this world.

Tell me that this isn't top-quality phrasemaking, beautifully economical characterization, pitch-perfect explication of the story's reality.

Easter, the belovèd daughter and last child of Wilbur and Hazel Mae, is twelve. She knows so much and still so little about the world. She is a prime target for the Others, the unseen ones she calls angels:

‘The Devil’ in Africa had been capricious, a trickster, and if cruel, only insomuch as bored young children, amoral and at loose ends, may be cruel: seeking merely to provoke an interesting event at any cost, to cause some disruption of the tedious status quo. For the Devil in America, however, malice itself was the end, and temptation a means only to destroy.

"The Devil" has agents or thralls or subjects, how would I know being the materialist meat-sack I am, but Easter knows:

And this whirligig thing’um, right here, was exactly what kept all the angels hereabouts leashed, year after year, to chase away pests, bring up water from deep underground when too little rain fell, or dry the extra drops in thin air when it rained too much.

When Easter listens to these angels, poor little lamb, she causes havoc on a scale her life is too short to know represents the normal state of humanity, that is to say struggle and striving. But the little love is so sorry for her mistake that she takes on a debt that can never be repaid. And that is when the world starts to set her up for the worst fall. Ma'am, she knows what "The Devil" is all about and she does what she can to make her Easter aware that something you don't, can't, comprehend fully is always the source of your troubles in life:

Ma’am. The white man’s gonna see that colored man can’t count, Ma’am, and cheat him out of all his money.

That’s right he is, Easter! And I promise you it ain’t no other outcome! Walk up in that bank just as rich as you please—but you gon’ walk out with no shoes, and owing the shirt on your back! Old Africa magic’s the same way, but worse, Easter, cause it ain’t money we got, me and you—all my babies had—and my own mama, and the grandfather they brung over on the slave ship. It’s life. It’s life and death, not money. Not play-stuff. But, listen here—we don’t know our numbers no more, Easter. See what I’m saying? That oldtime wisdom from over there, what we used to know in the Africa land, is all gone now. And, Easter, you just can’t walk up into the spirits’ bank not knowing your numbers. You rich, girl. You got gold in your pockets, and I know it’s burning a hole. I know cause it burnt me, it burnt your brother. But I pray you listen to me, baby child, when I say—you walk up in that bank, they gon’ take a heap whole lot more than just your money.

And take the payment Easter owes he does, this fine vile Devil we made for ourselves. The end of all good things seems to be slaughter, murder, lynching cruelty...and the pious and the safe say Never again...this time we mean it...never again.

Or next time...maybe the one after that.

But no, there's always a next time and never a never again. We don't learn because it wouldn't be near as much fun if we couldn't kill an anymore.

So Humanity goes on its violent, vile way, down and down.

Pay your buck or just go read the story on Tor.com. Either way you'll come away sure that Humanity (racist white "humanity" most especially) isn't pretty and maybe it's a good thing our time as "masters" is nearly done.

THE 2020 CAINE PRIZE SHORTLIST reviewed

The 2020 AKO Caine Prize for African Writing published in 2019 will be announced quite soon (see below). I will quote from the website's potted history of the prize, which is now in its twentieth year.

The Caine Prize – often described as Africa’s leading literary award – is granted annually for African creative writing. It is named after the late Sir Michael Caine, former Chairman of Booker plc and Chairman of the Booker Prize management committee for nearly 25 years.

The 21 countries represented in this year’s eligible submissions are: Angola, Benin, Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The Prize is awarded for a short story by an African writer published in English (indicative length 3,000 to 10,000 words). An African writer is taken to mean someone who was born in Africa, or who is a national of an African country, or has a parent who is African by birth or nationality.

Each writer shortlisted for the 2019 Caine Prize will be awarded £500, and the winner will receive a £10,000 prize. The twentieth winner of the Caine Prize will be announced at an award dinner on Monday, 8 July 2020, at Senate House, University of London, in partnership with SOAS and with the support of the Centre for African Studies. This date was announced after the COVID-19 lockdown knocked the originally scheduled date out of consideration, and is as of now still the planned event time. (For the curious, I reviewed the 2015 Prize shortlist because Lesley Nneka Arimah's story "What It Means When A Man Falls From the Sky" appeared on it; then later her story collection because it is fiery hot beautiful writing.)

All five writers whose work will be honored are listed here. Links to the Prize-eligible stories are the titles of the reviews below.

Irenosen Okijie's 2019 collection, Nudibranch, published by Dialogue Books in November 2019, and was listed by The Guardian on its Must Read Books in 2019 list.

Grace Jones introduces Sidra, or what's left of her, a Martinican impersonator whose life is a series of events arranged by enigmatic broker Hassan. Her externally flawless presentation of the Divine Grace on the night Author Okijie writes about is at a film producer's party, a celebration of whatever people like him hire impersonators like Sidra to decorate. Her entrance, escorted by "Marilyn Monroe," causes some stir:

She smiled at this part of what was essentially a ceremony, a performance. This part always felt
good. The bodies leaned in, clutching their wine glasses. The draughtsman appeared behind them holding two yellow-handled screwdrivers. There were tongues in the wine flutes, floating, then curling mid-scream, sinking to the bottom. Sidra closed her eyes momentarily as the humming in her brain
began. She disappeared into her role: Grace Jones.

Nothing perfect is truly flawless, though. The surface shine covers a roiling sea of powerful and impossible memories and dreams. Does Sidra see dead people, or is Miss Grace Jones giving her the grace of externalizing her agony?

Sidra doesn't know. I don't either. But I do know when a door to a different, richer, more intensely alive place opens. It does in these eighteen PDF pages.

Jowhor Ile's 2016 debut novel And After Many Days earned a 4.5-star rating from me. His Prize-eligible story reviewed here appeared first in The Sewanee Review.

Fisherman's Stew joins Nimi and Benji in the midst of their long-rehearsed body ballet, never mind that Benji has, well, died:

If it was a crack in her mind that had let Benji back into the world, she thought, then her intention was to keep the crack open, widen it. Her plan was to visit the evening market, and then make stew. She knew that if you love a person and they love you back, you can cook for them something that ensures they find their way to you, should they be lost.

Beautiful, and true, and the way Nimi constructs her world she spends not one unnecessary second questioning what her gift from beyond the grave will cost her. She will put utazi in her yam stew. She will bring Benji to her with the ineluctable, powerful fact of her love. As I would expect from Author Ile, it is very beautiful.

Chikodili Emelumadu is a UK-born Nigerian writer with a previous Caine Prize nomination, a slew of story publications in Apex Magazine, Luna Station Quarterly, as well as several anthologies, and received the inaugural (2019) Curtis Brown First Novel prize (£3000 and representation by literary legends Curtis Brown is a great prize!) for the as-yet-unreleased Dazzling.

What to do when your child brings home a Mami Wata I really don't think I can explain this bit of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell-esque surreality as well as simply showing you a portion of the text that made me pause, utterly convinced that I was reading an Official Government Document from a different reality:

In the case of a malevolent Mami (MMW) or Papi Wata (MPW), people have been known to simply let them expire. This is a clear breach of ethics. Please administer the prerequisite treatment and dial your local Interspecies Department (ID) for further advice on removing the Mami Wata
from your home, should you so desire.
Be advised that this does not always work and further action might be required. Your ID councillor will be able to provide you with help on this.
If you do not wish them to remain and would like to attempt a forceful ejection of an MMW or MPW from your home, see the section titled ‘Forceful Ejection of a Mami or Papi Wata from Your Home,’ in this booklet.⁹

⁹Be advised that a hypothesis has been posited and is currently undergoing some research as to Mami Watas and a manipulation of elements, and phenomena connected to water, even when such events may not occur in or around any body of water. These include but are not limited to: rain, rainstorms and hurricanes. See Sharknado film research by Levin, Thunder, NY, for further study and possible effects of this psycho-kinetic phenomenon.

It was only after googling "local Interspecies Department Long Island" that I was truly convinced I hadn't world-walked in my sleep.

Erica Sugo Anyadike is a Kenya-based Tanzanian television and film writer whose outings into short-story writing reflect her very visual sensibility. Her story in this year's prize pool was also shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

How to Marry An African President explores the power dynamic between African men and their wives. It's never ever good to be a woman, is it? To be forced to use wiles and stratagems to get ahead...never to be powerful except by reflection. To love someone is secondary to advancing your security...an illusion...but a powerful, narcotic, beautiful illusion.

Poison him and as you rightly assumed - a resulting quiet will ensue, no-one will dare criticise you any longer. He’ll survive but you knew he would. Out in the open, you’ll commiserate, calling for the would-be murderer to be brought to justice. But behind closed doors, you’ll claim a victory amongst your confidants. Your adversary will understand war-craft and opt for self-imposed exile.

In the end, it will not be enough.

In the end, what is...is "enough" a valid concept? Is the War Between the Sexes a place that "enough" should even be used?

Rémy Ngamije was born in Rwanda but is based in Namibia, where he is the founding publisher of Doek! (the country's first literary magazine). His first novel, The Eternal Audience of One, is coming soon in English (what with the Plague, we don't expect firm dates just now) from Scout Press/Simon & Schuster. His stories and photographs have appeared in every imaginable stripe of arts venue. This story was first published in The Johannesburg Review of Books, but look at his réumé! Remy The Quill

The Neighbourhood Watch follows Elias and his squad of scavengers as they do the rounds of the Central Business District of Windhoek (Namibia's capital city), its various outlying districts, to locate something—anything—of value and use to them in their reduced-to-nothingness circumstances. Their relationships, their identities, their entire essences are Now, are Today, are stripped of past and future:

The two men regarded each other as equals, both outcast by their former allegiances. Lazarus never volunteered information about his prison stint. Elias never asked. Everyone brought a past to the street and the present was always hungry. The street snacked on those who regretted, those who dreamt of a tomorrow that still required today to be survived.

That was the first thing Elias told Lazarus: the street has no future, there is only today. And today you need food. Today you need shelter. Today you need to take care of today.

This is the ultimate privilege check: Do you think about yesterday? If you can, if you do, you are rich by the world's standards. "Things were better when..." is something that can not be uttered absent the astounding, insufferable luxury of privilege. The people down the ladder who hold onto the idea of yesterday, to the blind unjust world's tomorrow, are the ones to pity as they quest for lost, or misplaced, privilege:

‘They are too proud to be like us,’ Elias says. ‘But they are the ones going home hungry every day.’

‘Pride is poor food,’ Lazarus says.

Pride feeds no mouth, and a well-fed soul in a starving body loses pride quickly. It is all the uglier for being ripped away instead of laid down or tossed aside. But Pride, my friends, is a slithering sneaking bastard, and patient with it. Pride finds the chink, Pride says, "just this once...just today..."

And we all buy the lie in the end.

A GAZELLE ATE MY HOMEWORK is three hours of laughs and snorts and tears...and SCREW people who think immigrants are dangerous!

A GAZELLE ATE MY HOMEWORK: A Journey from Ivory Coast to America, from African to Black, and from Undocumented to Doctor (with side trips into several religions and assorted misadventures)
HABIB FANNY, M.D.
Thorntree Press
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Sick of living in the shadows of a corrupt post-colonial Ivory Coast, intrepid gazelle hunter Habib Fanny schemes to see the opulence of America for himself, with naught but rudimentary raft-making skills and his trusty spear to aid him.

Well...that’s one version of the story, at least. In truth, Fanny’s story takes him on an adventure across continents, around dangerous political intrigue, into the depths of poverty, and through the complicated systems that provide him with a medical education. His journey to become an American is beset not by lions and man-eating sharks, but rather by persistent internal questions, which he attacks with the same rigor he brings to his schooling. What does it mean to be a Muslim, a Christian, an agnostic, or possibly, maybe, an atheist? What does it mean to be African in America, but not yet Black? And how on earth do you deal with the dating scene?

As he navigates the shifting waters of cultural identity, he’s forced to confront his own colonialist prejudices. Habib Fanny—that’s Doctor Habib Fanny, M.D., actually—doesn’t find gold-paved streets in America, but with humor and curiosity, he finds a path all his own.

I RECEIVED A DRC OF THIS BOOK FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+ AND I THANK THEM FOR APPROVING ME TO GET IT.

My Review: There are some people who defy the odds. There are a few more people who defy categorization. There are ever more people who defy Authority. (Thank goodness for that, especially at this moment in history.)

But there are not that many who do all three, in a foreign language, while a teenager, in a broken family and without a peer group's support. In fact, here he is: Habib Fanny (pronounced fahNEE), M.D.

A unicorn or a phoenix or both...a person of rare and astounding strength, depths of talent for caring and knack for survival turbocharged by burning in the crucible of adolescence while learning a new culture, and now he is using all his accumulated knowledge and wisdom to help suffering people recover from their ills and ailments.

It is worth mentioning that Dr. Fanny is an example of the kind of person whose visa will now be denied by presidential order, though it will not impact the good doctor himself. Just the many people across the world whose rosy view of our country, much like Author Fanny's view growing up, leads them to try to get here, to learn from our remaining great institutions and to give back the expertise they gain from our educational system.

However, be that as it may (and I wish to hell it wasn't), there's a book to review and here I go.

Habib Fanny was never going to have it easy in Detroit. His name, his Africanness, and his absolute ignorance of hoops and the NFL were going to present hurdles to socializing with the young men and women whose skin color, from a white outsiders point of view, should've made this socialization a conquest for him. Not so much...he's got nothing in common with the dead-enders, being intelligent and ambitious, and the stars aren't looking for cultural exchange so much as cultural escape.

So this formerly upper-middle class good student, now an impoverished immigrant son of a single mother, reinvents himself with humor (see the title of his book) and a reservoir of strength that is enviable and awe-inspiring and humbling. Seriously, my fellow Americans, is this person and the hundreds of thousands who are like him around the world, someone we want to support excluding from joining the American Experiment? A man who works his way through medical school while still answering without rancor others' jibes and insults about his heritage, his skin color? In his place, I'd've booked it back to Ivory Coast.

Yet in addition to writing this book as an adult, Author Fanny has taken on medical practice in a new state, during a pandemic, while still mentoring his nieces and nephews into the life of the mind (he talks them into reading!), while *also* answering random strangers' questions on Quora and having a spiritual awakening.

Are you in love with him yet? If not, I fear you are dead inside. Here's a snippet of conversation responding to a Quora user's query about how he is doing in this difficult time:

I’m a loner. I’ve always been. My little sister is 7 years younger. The sibling closest to me in age is 6 years older. I played by myself a lot as a kid. I still do. But by moving to a city where I hardly knew anyone, and in the middle of a pandemic requiring physical distancing, I may have signed up for more solitude than even I can handle. And yet it must be handled. And so it will.

Author Habib Fanny, M.D., theydies and gentlethem. I urge you to read the heck out of his hilarious and touching memoir...with a side trip into capsule modern African history...to be sure he knows how very much he is loved and valued for his own unique self.