SONGS MY MOTHER TAUGHT ME: Why the Artist Must Take Sides, truth told, action called for

SONGS MY MOTHER TAUGHT ME: Why the Artist Must Take Sides
SAUL WILLIAMS
Haymarket Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, avaiable now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending September 16, 2026

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Award-winning poet and performer Saul Williams explores how artists today must respond to systemic violence and injustice—in the words of Paul Robeson, by choosing sides.

Songs My Mother Taught Me is Williams’ clear-eyed exploration of the role of the artist in these times by answering the question: what radicalized you? He answers by examining how his role models—writers and artists, from Amiri Baraka to local musicians in Brazilian bars to Palestinian hip-hop heads—have responded to imperialist violence, oppression, and genocide. Riffing on Paul Robeson’s famous declaration, Williams builds a provocative case for why today’s artists cannot remain neutral in the face of injustice. “We need songs that crumble empires,” he writes, “films that teach, remind, and inspire, poems that would make a despot revoke your citizenship.”

The radical artists of the Vanguard Series offer new poetry and prose to answer the question, What does poetry have to do with politics?

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My Review: What does poetry have to do with anything, demands my inner poetry-averse Philistine. What all art has to do with politics, answers reasonable me.

Everything. Just as Reverend Jedidiah, here, says it does.

I was inclined to listen to the words of the Reverend from Sinners because everything he's saying in these barely-200 pages is so exactly what I'd like you to hear...art matters or "They" would not try to censor it, take it away from you, hide it if "They" don't approve of it...search engine enshittification is more complicated than a ban, but also flies under your radar and has built-in plausible deniability.

You are what you consume. Go light on the empty, sweet-tasting, pretty but pointless stuff for a healthy mind/body/spirit (health is the enemy of bullshit on every measurable axis). Reverend Jedidiah says so too, out of his complicated mind and mouth. I'm very impressed by Author Saul's meditations on the promises and beauties in spirituality being bait (my word) for the hook of obedience and deference to authority. It's deeply saddening, but true as even a brief glance at the world shows you. Taking sides in the culture wars is often hardest for people who see the misuse of their source of joy and consolaion in the world. So much of the noise in the world is, and always has been, intended to make it hard for you to focus for very long. Breaking through the noise is best done by listening to it, looking for what it's pushing you to accept. Advertising, for example, is pushing you to accept the "blessing" of capitalism...look at this maginificent abundance of stuff! see what an amazing life you can have!...without looking at the wages no one can live on, the cost of the plastic it's wrapped in, the fact that it's flimsy and will break. Begin your journey at church...why would Jesus say it's fine to rip kids away from parents, to take fathers from their families to be shipped away not even where they came from and might have needed to escape, when a huge part of the christian message is "love thy neighbor?" All very obvious. But the noise, the shouting, the struggle to afford all the brummagem gauds makes the obvious recede into shadows so it won't bother you with its obviousness.

"They" don't need to lie to you if "They" can distract you from the stone-cold obvious truth.

Author Saul follows in the footsteps of truly great souls, from Paul Robeson to his mother. He distills into readable, relatable prose the truths that can feel threatening to acknowledge, accept, and act on: You, no matter how "small" or "insignificant" you think you are, must take sides. You can't afford not to. There is too much at stake, too much happening that we can not let go on as it is.

Take comfort in reading Author Saul's wisdom. No, it's not easy. It never is.

It's necessary instead.

SELF-HELP FROM THE MIDDLE AGES: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About Living, never forget people are ALWAYS people not labels

SELF-HELP FROM THE MIDDLE AGES: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About Living
PETER JONES
Doubleday (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From medieval historian Peter Jones comes a groundbreaking guide to navigating contemporary life through the wisdom of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Peter Jones was teaching medieval history at a university in Siberia when his third icy winter there plunged him into a dark place. Luckily, he knew something few of us know—that for all its reputation for darkness and superstition, the Middle Ages were the golden age of self-help. So he set out on a journey to explore the wisdom of medieval scholars, saints, and mystics, looking for an alternative path through the challenges of modern life.

Never in history, Jones marvels in Self-Help from the Middle Ages, has so much energy and talent gone into studying how the mind works as in the medieval centuries. Although today we think of the Seven Deadly Sins as a catalog of forbidden behavior, in the Middle Ages, at the height of their currency, they were a path to self-knowledge and self-forgiveness. Together, pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony and lust were a psychological map that laid out seven basic patterns of thought, showing how our thinking can go astray and how we can find our way home.

In Self-Help from the Middle Ages, Jones explores each sin, searching the hellscapes of Hieronymous Bosch and Giotto, the intimate confessions of Dante and Margery Kempe, and the personal struggles of Francis of Assisi and Catherine of Siena. Along the way he discovers a treasure trove of lost truths about temptation, frustration, addiction, compulsion, burnout, rage, fear, anxiety, and grief that still pulse with life. With beautiful illustrations drawn from medieval art and literature, his book is a gift to all who love history and anyone who has ever sought wisdom from the past.

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My Review: What happens when a scholarly British man with an advanced medieval-history degree from an American school gets a seriously good job in Russophone academia? He moves to Siberia! (Before the Ukraine war begins. He lives in Madrid now.)

Siberia. The place Russia sends people to die in misery. A byword, in US English anyway, for grim, awful exile, for the place you're sent to pay for your sins. I'm afraid this is where I start revealing my prejudices: I envied this polyglot scholar for his seriously good luck. I envied him for living a life I'm still feeling angry at being denied a chance to pursue (though Siberia was never in my mind as an option). So already two of the deadly sins ticked off—again—my life's list of the damned things committed. Oh okay, I'm getting the point now, thought I.

Siberia, the severeness of it, wore on the spirit of Author Jones. He experienced the dark night of the soul, the terrible trackless waste of depression. Being a scholar by nature the solution was obvious: you are not the first person to have this problem. How did those others handle it? The seven deadly sins offer up a schema for understanding the workings of the human mind as well as a perspective check on what your emotional weather really means.

These "sins" are, of course, deeply enmeshed with christian concepts of a religiously ordered universe. Sin more broadly is a religious concept of transgressing a divinely ordained code and appears in multiple religious traditions. It's only natural that a medievalist from England would gravitate towards concepts familiar from his scholarly activities.

In the memoir portions of this narrative, the author evokes very movingly the experience of researching, identifying, and handling medieval manuscripts that contain the seven deadly sins and their explications of how these can be used to improve one's soul. The goal in these readings iss to give the reader a map towards salvation, union with the god of the christians; but as Author Jones elucidates, how different is that goal from modern self-help books' stated goal of helping one become better, happier, more adept at navigating your life. People have sought ways to understand their inner workings, how to cultivate their minds/souls into "better" or "happier" behaviors since the oracle at Delphi...much earlier than that, I am certain, because a pithy aperçu like "know thyself" isn't a first draft, and it is carved in literal stone so it's been workshopped to a fare-thee-well, though it wasn't done in writing so the records are implicit only.

We're highly intelligent, us humans, curious about ourselves because we're so different from other creatures. We have access to the thoughts and the musings and the conclusions of millennia of our forebears. A scholar would know where and how to look for insight into issues common to us all. Descriptions of depression, of psychological maladjustments, maladaptive behaviors, and solutions to the problems arising therefrom, might vary but the impetus to look for ways to be, feel, act "better" is constant. Author Jones seeks the commonality between the seven deadly sins and modern self-help schemata because he needs help, knows our ancestors...sons, daughters, lovers, spouses just like us...needed help figuring out the best ways to be fulfilled. He accomplishes this in the way that best uses his personal strengths. He tells us about his quest in plainly personal terms, clearly stating his stakes in starting the quest. (I frame it as a quest because he's a medievalist and "happiness" is a grail quest.) It is more this strand of his narrative that I found involving, engaging. I was less invested in the rubber-meets-the-road formulations of how the personally offensive to me religious concept of the sins themselves represent paths to self-knowledge. This is a very useful and, to me, persuasive argument. It's offensive to me because the religion it's embedded within is evil and vile, used to create division and enact horrors of cruelty; if there is a "God" as they name her, and she tolerates these terrible acts committed in her nsme, she is not the kind of god who deserves worship.

None of that is addressed in this book; I can't offer an otherwise fully merited fifth star because to do so is to accept a fundamental agreement with an argument for "God" and her christian system's validity.

This is purely a personal inability to tolerate any support of the christian worldview,however tacit it may be, as in any way moral or positively constructive.

THE FAMILY SNITCH: A Daughter’s Memoir of Truth and Lies, or "how to reintegrate after surviving a toxic system"

THE FAMILY SNITCH: A Daughter’s Memoir of Truth and Lies
FRANCESCA FONTANA
Steerforth Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A journalist’s relentless, unsparing interrogation of family ties, the ways we deceive ourselves and others, and how we live with what we’ve done

A stunning debut, perfect for fans of Nicole Chung, Ashley C. Ford, and David Carr's The Night of the Gun

Francesca's parents represented opposing world-views. Her mother always slid her way out of questions about the past, saying only “My life started when you were born.” Her dad, an absent bodybuilder, loved telling stories about his seemingly larger-than-life past. He said he would tell her anything she wanted to know. But more often than not, it was a total lie. When Francesa was 9, he went to prison, and her mother, the grounding center of Francesca's world, moved her half a continent away...

The Family Snitch started as a youthful experiment in journalistic investigation. Francesca began to uncover her father's secret criminal past. But in her increasingly dogged pursuit of the truth at any cost, was she just selling everybody out?

In her thought-provoking exploration, Francesca also interrogates her own relationship to the truth, finding that she trusts almost no one and refuses to believe anything that can’t be backed by hard evidence. She turns to experts on memory and psychology, in search of someone to help explain the secrets kept between parents and children, and the inheritances they leave us in the fallout of their choices. She pulls on the threads that lead her back through the forms that came before this theater and film, Greek tragedy and myth.

The result is a page-turning memoir that is also an artful work of literature with enduring appeal.

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My Review: Confronting your past is a big part of the job of growing up. Learning the realities of your origins can be discomfiting. Myths that take root are rooted in misunderstandings, lies believed, facts spun...it's astounding how much looking for official records can teach you. If, of course, you know where to look...and that the records exist. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, after all.

Frankie, as the author chooses to be known in the book, grows up in a very troubled system. Her family is riven by silent elisions, careful misdirections; she comes to develop a full-blown case of OCD that becomes the giant power source for her journalism. Talk about making lemonade from life's lemons!

Lemonade is sour under the sweet, though. I read this book thinking how much expectation Frankie was leaving aside as she told this brutally painful story of the betrayal she felt as she discovered how little truth there was in her family in a reportorial style. Most memoir readers...I think we're past the peak of the memoir craze, it's solidified into a market with expectations...want to experience catharsis, weep buckets, feel the hollow burn of referred rage...not really available here. I thought Frankie's choice to narrate events was more affecting for its restraint. I'm not necessarily going to resonate to messy, splashy, look-at-me pyrotechnics. It's true the narrative switches from first to third person at seemingly unprompted intervals, but I came to realize this was Frankie's way of inserting her self into the narrative at the times it felt safe to her to do so.

For me, then, realizing the roots of Frankie's control in her demonstrated inability to trust anything or anyone in her family of origin made her decision to write the story at all an act of generous-spirited bravery, so the relatively matter-of-fact prose heightened my own experience of the read. It won't be to everyone's taste but I'd encourage you to look at the actual details before dismissing the style: A big, warm, largely absent daddy who tells you "anything you want to know" but in such a self-aggrandizing tone even your kid-self wonders, a mother who's a fogbank, impossible to pin down, so evasive she tells you the reason she's alive at all is you.

No pressure, child, just know your mother's *entire*life*is*your*reponsibility.

How Frankie made it to adulthood and used the gargantuan burdens heaped on her to become Author Fontana is astonishing. By rights no one would criticize her if she just huddled in a corner gibbering quietly to herself to try to make sense of her life. Instead we got this remarkable account of facing up to a past rife with stressors, replete with bad parenting, and lived in an unshareable bubble. How many friends do you have who could hang with you as you process your father's criminal history?

It's the main story, of course. Frankie has, that bloody OCD demands it, to dig in and determine the facts at last. What happened, when, who did he harm, why was it done. I'm always just a bit squicked out by true-crime entertainment. The victim (if alive) realizing strangers are judging them, harshly or not, is...distressing...to me; the family of the perpetrator likewise. It's both justice (if legal results are obtained) and not, re-experiencing traumas and having them made public property. Ask a writer who's had a really bad review how it affects one's emotional well-being to be exposed to every irritating twidgee with a keyboard and an opinion. Now blow it up ten times because it's not anything you asked for.

So I'm in two minds. Brava to Frankie for doing the work; has Author Fontana really thought this through? I dunno, nothing in the story or the later discussions tells me. I don't know how that would be accomplished without *major* spoilers; I get why it isn't done, but it leaves me ambivalent about the story's purpose not necessarily being one I can get all the way behind. Missing star thus explained.

I've seen many indifferent-to-poor memoirs burn up the sales charts. I'd like to see this brave, kind, generous soul join them. She deserves the worldly success.

NO SON OF MINE: A Memoir, a son's generous gift of forgiveness to a dead mother

NO SON OF MINE: A Memoir
JONATHAN CORCORAN
University Press of Kentucky
$29.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Born and raised in rural West Virginia, Jonathan Corcoran was the youngest and only son of three siblings in a family balanced on the precipice of poverty. His mother, a traditional, evangelical, and insular woman who had survived abuse and abandonment, was often his only ally. Together they navigated a strained homelife dominated by his distant, gambling-addicted father and shared a seemingly unbreakable bond.

When Corcoran left home to attend Brown University, a chasm between his upbringing and his reality began to open. As his horizons and experiences expanded, he formed new bonds beyond bloodlines, and met the upper-middle-class Jewish man who would become his husband. But this authentic life would not be easy, and Corcoran was forever changed when his mother disowned him after discovering his truth. In the ensuing fifteen years, the two would come together only to violently spring apart. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged in 2020, the cycle finally ended when he received the news that his mother had died.

In No Son of Mine, Corcoran traces his messy estrangement from his mother through lost geographies: the trees, mountains, and streams that were once his birthright, as well as the lost relationships with friends and family and the sense of home that were stripped away when she said he was no longer her son. A biography nestled inside a memoir, No Son of Mine is Corcoran's story of alienation and his attempts to understand his mother's choice to cut him out of her life. Through grief, anger, questioning, and growth, Corcoran explores the entwined yet separate histories and identities of his mother and himself.

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My Review: Y'all remember my four-star review of The Rope Swing? The man who wrote that, wrote this. What I noted then was that I felt removed from the people in his stories, like something I'd expected to be immediate and intimate was not quite that.

Objection overruled, eight-years-ago me.

The story of a Southern son...and Appalachia, where Author Corcoran hails from, is its own thing but is also The South...of a religious Mama who, in firm in her Faith, rejects her child whom she bore, nurtured, and loved, is not new nor is it underrepresented in the literary scene. UPK made the book available to me; I respected the author's chops; I started the read cautiously optimistic that it would be a Good Read. And that it was.

Being raised by a religious mother is often troublesome for a son. She often uses faith as a punishment. Her efforts to parent are more likely to be aimed at one's religious well-being and not quite concerned enough with the problems of being an adolescent. What Author Corcoran does in his memoir is to make you part of the fabric of the troubled (and frankly troubling to my atheist eyes) family he came from, and overcame. His education at elite Brown University, where my own eldest sister graduated from, drew him away from the limited life of his borderline impoverished, uneducated, Bible-believing family; not coincidentally, it introduced him to his desire's fulfillment in the gay demimonde, so to speak, of university life.

Once that genie's out of the bottle, that is that. Gawd stops being The Big Bad, and sex becomes possible to imagine as part of one's life without thunderation and guilt. Until, of course, one goes home.

It might be this bit that truly hit home hardest for me: That fracturing of the idea of Home. The title of the book gives the game away. "No son of mine" is harsh, unforgiving, and stone-cold. Those are words I heard as well. They sever the taproot of family brutally and irreparably. The rest of one's life they resonate, drowning out the less-resonant words of lovingkindness one attracts. One day, if one is VERY lucky, a voice will say "I love you" in the exact canceling resonance to that thunderous rejection...and that good luck came to Author Corcoran, or I simply could not have borne to read or write about this book. I knew that going in, as I follow him on Facebook, so I was in no doubt that this would be the case. Even being uncertain of this facet of his present-day life would have rendered me unable to read the book, so strongly do I feel about it.

What made Author Corcoran write this memoir now is the pandemic just past. His mother died in the pandemic without the two of them being able to reach mutual forgiveness. That is an incalculable agony. Staying silent, not howling one's pain to the world, is just flat imposssible. Being a writer meant that he chose to make this hegira from belief, to education, to rejection, to sad, grieving acceptance of one's losses in words. His life today is a materially and emotionally better one, his loving partnership is a source of acceptance and self-worth support, it is in short a story of succeeding without forgetting his beginnings. What pleased me, as a reader, the most was the fact that I never once felt that he belittled or looked down on his mother, or the world he left behind; that is a spiritual generosity that I can but envy.

In his evocation of a life left behind, Author Corcoran leaves the reader with the sense that he looks on his mother and the life she led, the teachings she imparted, and the world she lived in as a chrysalis from which he emerged, not a trap from which he escaped.

That is the best gift a parent can receive from an adult child. I am deeply saddened that the author's mother is not alive to receive it.