"Rising Out of Hatred: the Awakening of a Former White Nationalist

Derek Black

   What a riveting biography!  The research behind this book is amazing!  The author spent hundreds of hours with Derek Black, the young man who was expected to lead the White Nationalist movement.
  Derek was immersed in this movement from his birth, groomed by his father and also mentored by David Duke.  Both of these older men had been involved in the Ku Klux Klan.
   Derek never believed in violence, but did follow the ideology of white superiority.
     The book begins with Obama's inauguration.  There was an increase in white racist activity and Obama was receiving 30 death threats a day!  Gun sales had skyrocketed!  The white supremacists were working non-stop with speeches, literature and a 24-hour online radio network.  Derek was deeply involved.  He had been home-schooled and programmed in white supremacy.  However, at 19, he was away from home for the first time and influenced by the outside world.  He was attending university and made some good friends.  He became very conflicted and felt that he was living two lives.  So he 'outed' himself. When the news of his affiliation spread, many fellow students pulled away, but one Jewish friend invited him to Shabbat dinner each Friday.  An interesting group gathered there- gay, Hispanic, black, Jewish - male and female.  These friends caused Derek to question much of his upbringing.  But how do you distance yourself, when you are the 'leading light of the white nationalist movement'?

Author- Eli Saslow

  This author, Eli Saslow, described Derek's struggle in such intimate detail!  I love the way he gave interesting backstories of each character, helping the reader understand all the issues involved.

"Hillbilly Elegy" by J.D Vance

"Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis"  
Elegy means 'lament' - to praise and express sorrow in a story or a poem.
  I think the title is perfect!  It gets to the core of the story.  This memoir expresses sorrow for the hillbilly culture, but praise for those who do their best with the life they have.  I think the author wishes to educate those who have no connection with such life experiences.
   This memoir begins with the story of the author's grandparents, married at ages 14 and 17, who grew up in the hills of Kentucky, where they learned 'hillbilly justice',  involving guns and violence.  Vance calls himself, as well as his extended family, 'hillbillies'.  
          There was an exodus out of Kentucky when the mines closed and the hillbillies migrated to other states- Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Pennsylvania.  But, "you can take the boy out of Kentucky but you can't take Kentucky out of the boy". And so, the violence, yelling and lives of dysfunction continued.
Quote: "Hillbilly culture blended a robust sense of honor, devotion to family, and bizarre sexism into a sometimes explosive mix".

J.D.Vance

   J.D. Vance never forgot the grandparents who helped him through his childhood.  The dedication on this book says: 'For Mamaw and Papaw, my very own terminators".
  This book was written in 2016 and people believe that the book tries to show how Americans could be drawn to Donald Trump, who was running for president.
  The author made an interesting point that we can't judge a person's actions when we have no idea what their life circumstances have been.  The results of domestic violence and drug addiction in a child's life are well documented.  We know that the author was able to 'rise above his raising', but he explains in detail how difficult it is to move from the working class to the professional class.  It means leaving your identity behind.    

"Inheritance" by Dani Shapiro

"A memoir of genealogy, paternity, and love"
    Dani Shapiro grew up in a Jewish Orthodox family.  Her grandparents had been pillars of the Jewish community and Dani loved her Jewish father. 
Quote: "I had a powerful, nearly romantic sense of my family and its past".
     But, at 54, her husband was researching his family history and decided to send away for a DNA kit.  On the spur of the moment, Dani decided to also send her saliva sample.  What she discovered completely devastated her.  Her father was not really her father!  Both of Dani's parents were dead, as well as the

Dani and her Jewish father.

rest of the older generation of her family.  There was no one who could help her figure this out.  
   I was surprised by the devastation that Dani felt at this news. 
Quote:
"I slipped out of bed and walked barefoot into the bathroom.  My mind and body seemed to be disconnected.  My body wasn't the body I had believed it to be for fifty-four years.  My face wasn't my face.  That's what it felt like.  If my body wasn't my body, and my face wasn't my face, who was I?"

I would expect that it could be distressing and difficult to absorb, but Dani was already an adult with a family of her own.  But these are her thoughts:
"What makes a person a person?"
"Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?"

   She was obsessed as she delved into discovering her real ancestry.  And so she turned to the computer and enlisted the help of a genealogy researcher.

                                 I found this memoir absolutely compelling!

Akin

   I enjoy four things about novels- characters, setting, plot, and language.  What I enjoyed most about this novel are the main characters and the setting.
   Noah Salvaggio was a newly-retired professor in New York, planning to spend his 80th birthday in the place of his birth- Nice, France.  His wife and sister were dead and he had no children.  So he was free to travel. He had found, in his sister's belongings, photographs that had been taken by his mother during the war, and those photos brought up many questions about his mother's life.  He knew that his mother had sent him from Nice to New York when he was four, to live with his father, while she stayed behind for two years.  What happened during those two years?
   Into the story comes an 11-year-old boy, whose father has died of a drug over-dose and his mother is in jail.  Michael is the name of the boy and he is the grandson of Noah's sister.  And he has nowhere to go because his grandmother (his mother's mother) had been caring for him, but she also died.  Could you follow all that?  This boy has been through much turmoil and is the only living relative of Noah- Noah's great nephew!
  As unreal as that may sound, it makes for a great story of an 80-year-old man and an 11-year-old boy.  And the setting to the story is Nice.  Two interesting characters in the French Riviera, who have never met before.  The generation gap is so obvious as these two strangers discover that they are more alike than different.  In fact, they are AKIN.

   Emma Donoghue was inspired to write about Nice after spending two years there with her partner and her children.  She felt that she never became fluent in French, but there are many French terms in the novel, as she felt that she was writing a love-letter to the country that fascinated her so much.
   As Noah searched out the story of his mother's photographs (with the help of computer-game obsessed Michael), there is an interesting look into the art world of twentieth-century France.

Emma Donoghue

Emma Donoghue

   The author, Emma Donaghue came to Cambridge on her recent book tour.  It was the first well-known author event in our  newly-acquired library building, The Old Post Office.
  I had read her novel, "Room", which had been a great success, although it had a very sad premise.
  It is about a woman who is imprisoned by a rapist in a windowless shed, where she gives birth to Jack.  The story is told in the voice of 5-year-old Jack who has never seen the outside world.  I did not find the voice credible- the expressions and vocabulary.  But perhaps it was the darkness of the story that bothered me.  However, I was impressed with the creativity of the mother to structure the boy's life, year after year, in one room.
  The book was made into a movie and even became a stage play with songs.  So it had many covers.

  
   Emma is a very interesting speaker.  She is involved in so many projects.  While raising two children, she takes advantage of every spare moment to write or research.  She has been able to support herself with her writing since she was 23.
   Emma was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1969, and has degrees from Dublin University as well as Cambridge University in England.

   
   She spent years commuting between England, Ireland and Canada, until 1998, when she settled in London, Ontario, where she has been writing youth fiction and non-fiction as well as teaching creative writing.
  She has many projects going at any time - film, T.V., and even radio plays.  You can understand that she would be an interesting speaker



  
  Her visit to Cambridge was part of her book tour for her new novel.  We were very fortunate to have her in our city and I enjoyed her presentation very much.  And so, even though I wasn't thrilled about "Room", I decided to read "Akin".  This novel is a return to a relationship between an adult and a child.  But the premise is much brighter.  I will write about it on my next blog.



Back to the covers for "Room".  How do you like them? I love covers and I quite like the last one- creative like the novel.  That cover would have caught my eye in the bookstore and I might have read it just for that reason.

"Unfollow" by Megan Phelps-Roper

   The subtitle of this book is "A memoir of loving and leaving the Westboro Baptist Church".  And the memoir clearly shows how much the author loved her large family.  She had 10 siblings, many aunts, uncles and cousins, and her grandfather was the founder of the church, which was mostly comprised of family members.
  Her grandfather was angry about the gay activity he believed was happening in their local park in Topeka, Kansas.  So the church began picketing, causing a disturbance with their hateful signs. Megan joined the picket line when she was five. 
   The picketing and the signs grew worse over time. The U.S was involved in wars and the church protested by picketing at the funerals of soldiers.  Her grandfather believed that everyone was going to hell, except his church members. So it was a case of them against the world. They gained world-wide attention and were the subject of a documentary by the BBC called "The most hated family in America".

    The church preached hate, but Megan also experienced love in the family.  What a very difficult combination!
   As Megan grew up, she became aware of the inconsistencies in the church doctrine.  Since she had no social life apart from her family, she learned about the world through her Twitter account, and eventually found strength and support among her Twitter followers.




    Here is Megan as a dutiful church member.  She even joined the picket line when it was at her school.
  This memoir is a reminder of the damage of extremism.  Obviously, Megan had no idea how hurtful her actions were.  She was just an obedient daughter and granddaughter, who thought her family was RIGHT.
   In 2012, at age 26, Megan left the church, left her family, and basically left her life behind.  Her description of this time is heart-breaking!

   
   After great emotional and spiritual turmoil, Megan was able to begin a new family.  She is trying to make up for the harm she caused, by speaking out about extremism in any form.  She is courageous and loving, and her memoir is heart-breaking and insightful!



How I discovered this memoir:
My daughter loves to send me lists of books.  This book was included in a list of "Seven of the Most Inspiring Novels and Memoirs from 2019" from Greater Good magazine: "Science-based insights for a meaningful life".   An excellent memoir!