Lower East Side Librarian

Instead of reviewing the latest book in the Sookie Stackhouse series, I prefer to gossip about it. Beware of spoilers.

I fell for Grammar Girl's podcasts, especially those that vindicate and explain my grammar (usage) pet peeves. One example is end punctuation and quotation marks. In America, they generally go on the inside, in case you were wondering. The "Why Are British English and American English Different?" episode explains it. Scroll down to "Typesetters Quotations Versus Logical Quotations." Like Fogarty, I think the American way is illogical, but it's how we do it here, and I get annoyed when I see people doing it wrong. Same with Anglophile spellings. So annoying!

This book got me to wondering about the Ls, who moved in down the street from me when I was a kid. They were from Chile, but I have no idea if they fled oppression or sneaked out with their money. Probably the former, given the timing, but I think my parents didn't like them, so I don't know. Anyway, this book is written mostly from the point of view of the son of a Chilean political prisoner. While the father, Marcelo, was being tortured in jail, his wife, eleven-year-old son Daniel, and eight-year-old daughter Tina emigrated to Madison, Wisconsin. Eventually the family is reunited, but Marcelo is very broken. At seventeen Daniel is doing pretty well; he has a girlfriend, excels at soccer, and plays guitar in a band. His sister isn't thriving quite as handily, and I'm not sure about Mamá.

Tween Black Panther lit! Three kids travel to Oakland for the summer to stay with their estranged and unmotherly mother. She sends them out every day to Black Panther breakfast and summer camp while she stays home and writes poems for the revolution. The story is told from the oldest girl's point-of-view. At 11, and motherless for most of her life, she takes care of her younger sisters and is fearful about hanging out with the Panthers. Still, she takes in their message, and it makes her stronger. Not that she wasn't plenty strong already. Delphine is a nuanced and believable character, as are her sisters. I loved the tidbits defining African-American kids lives in the 60s/70s, them counting black people on television and how many lines they had, encountering white hippies in the Haight and Teutonic tourists in Chinatown, and most of all their getting to see the BPP as an aid organization.

Patti Smith's adventures with Robert Mapplethorpe and lots of the happening artists and musicians of the late 60s/early 70s--pretty neat to be inside her head like that.

I'm a little afraid to proclaim how much I enjoyed this middle class white lady prison memoir for fear that my prison justice activist friends will tell me everything that's wrong with it. Regardless, Orange Is the New Black is a really good read. In Smith alumna Piper Kerman tells of her experiences doing time for a drug crime committed over ten years before her incarceration. It's not a woe is me (or woe is I) story. She fully cops to her crime and in fact prison does educate her on just how deleterious drug trafficking is when she understands her fellow inmates' addictions and plights. She isn't uncritical, though, of the "war on drugs."

I secretly wish I was a doctor and not so secretly distrust and resent the medical profession, not to mention the health care industry. The House of Hope and Fear touches on the latter, more than the former. The author/doctor exhibits some annoyance with patients (and their families) that want to participate in developing their own treatment plans. The stories detail the cases of various emergency department patients, but the book is more about the Harborview hospital itself. Even so I didn't feel like I ever comprehended Harborview's unique funding model. It gets some public funds, but doesn't rely on them? But part of its mission is to serve the uninsured. The real problem with this book, which I neither loved nor hated, btw, is that it feels like it was written for someone's approval. Probably a few someones, since the book isn't as coherent as it could be.