March 2025 in Books: What I've Been Reading

In March, I finished the books All Our Ordinary Stories by Teresa Wong and Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer, and felt satisfied with the progress through my to-be-read list. In Leipzig, the book fair took place as well, but this year it took place without me due to my lingering cold and other personal factors.

All Our Ordinary Stories (cover)
Arsenal Pulp Press

I also 'binged' the 2025 Canada Reads competition on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation channel (YouTube). The friendly and attentive circle of panellists who were drawn from the books, sports, cooking, and television worlds was — as online commentators noted — less bloodthirsty (for lack of a better word) than in previous years.

Teresa Wong's book is from the Canada Reads longlist.

Besides I've read A Two-Spirit Journey — co-authored by Ma-Nee Chacaby and Mary Louisa Plummer, it's a memoir of the extremely difficult life of an Indigenous woman born in the province Ontario — which made it onto the shortlist.

Next up on my Canadian, independently published reading list is another shortlisted book: Dandelion, by Jamie Chai Yun Liew.

Dandelion (cover)
Arsenal Pulp Press

A Two-Spirit Journey was not literarily written, some commentators said. But I thought it did have a style. Listening to it in the audiobook version, I did not find it dry either: I pictured scenes, people and times in my mind, and the spiritual world of Ma-Nee Chacaby's grandmother. On the other hand, I too found that reading about the abuse that the author suffered as a child was very heavy. (All I'll say is that I'd never considered the ethical pros and cons of castration in depth before; but this book led me into that train of thought.) But in the end I'm not sure it's a sound literary criterion to tell somebody that their life is so difficult that one doesn't want to read about it.

A Two-Spirit Journey (cover)
University of Manitoba Press

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here is a lengthy look at United States immigration policy since the early 1900s. The journalist author (New Yorker) interweaves life stories of individual Latin American asylum seekers as case studies, convincingly arguing that US foreign policy missteps exacerbate problems in Latin American countries, resulting then in larger quantities of Latin Americans who flee to the southern US border.

It's stylistically a cross between an Amnesty International report and long-form magazine journalism. It's also a close portrait, in its final chapters, of a Trump administration's modus operandi when there are no 'adults in the room.' 

Where do we go from here, if there is not enough public support for making sure that every asylum seeker is well cared for?
— The Hippocratic Oath probably applies as well to immigration and foreign policy matters as to medicine: First do no harm.
And I think that part of 'doing no harm' means not making refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants scapegoats for socio-economic problems that already would have existed without them.

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here (cover)
Penguin Press

A Memoir of Two Presidential Offices, and More

An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s was published this year by the American presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who was already a familiar name, and nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award in the Memoir genre.

Doris Kearns Goodwin at a BooksExpo in 2018
Photograph attributed to Rhododendrites
via Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 4.0)

It is a memoir of a kind I've never read before:

In the house where the Goodwins — now in their 70s and 80s — are living in Concord, Massachusetts, they were storing boxes of documents from Richard Goodwin's (the husband's) career in the 1960s. (Doris Kearns Goodwin explored documents of her own life as well, explained during the earlier chapters of the book.)

The Goodwins open the boxes and explore these, often reading documents out loud to each other, as a special book project.

The historian interweaves, into the history, their affectionate banter, reminiscences, and years-long debates over the respective and competing virtues of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, as well as the couple's nostalgia for the 1960s. (She does have a partial eye, and you can make up your own mind how many of her defenses of Johnson, for example, make sense.)

But Doris Kearns Goodwin and Richard N. Goodwin have a far from ordinary perspective on federal politics in the 1960s:

Richard Goodwin was a junior speechwriter for John F. Kennedy under Ted Sorensen, later a self-appointed Latin America expert. Then, after Kennedy's assassination, he wrote speeches and led messaging amongst other projects for Johnson's Great Society.

Finally, he tried to help Robert F. Kennedy and, at other times, Eugene McCarthy, win the presidency — helping both of them for the sake of thwarting the Vietnam War, but also helping Robert F. Kennedy due to their personal friendship.

Doris Kearns Goodwin was a White House fellow during Johnson's presidency, and later helped write his autobiography; she also writes about experiencing the 60s as a socially conscious Ivy League college student.

Bryan Cranston reads letters her husband wrote in his young years, and the Kennedys and Johnson speak in historical excerpts, in the audio recording. Although the audiobook was over 14 hours long, it did not feel that way: Doris Kearns Goodwin's narration, as well as the special additions, were engrossing.

The ending is extremely touching.

*

Ideal accompaniment: videos from the LBJ Presidential Library's account on YouTube, e.g. archived live-streamed videos from the 2014 Civil Rights Summit.

***

Cover of Becoming,
via Wikipedia

Another recently finished memoir:

Becoming (2018), by former First Lady Michelle Obama, has been reviewed often elsewhere.

It's enough to say that the accolades for her memoir about her childhood, Ivy League education, professional career, marriage, and life as the First Lady are justified.

It is comforting, as President Joe Biden's presidency nears its close and the next administration approaches, to see life in the White House from the perspective of a human, idealistic, thoughtful tenant.

***

Lastly, I have begun Jonathan Blitzer's far-ranging book on the history and polemics of migration at the US-Mexico border: Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here (2024). It was recommended by Barack Obama in summer, then nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award.

The American journalist's epic work is not always easy to read, because of its subject matter. It describes, for example, arbitrary killings and torture in El Salvador, from the 1930s to the present.

Canada Reads 2020: From the Ashes

In mid-July, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation held its annual Canada Reads competition. The stand-up comedian Ali Hassan hosted the show again, and five jurors were assembled to judge the candidates for this year. Each of them championed a book of their choice.

"From the Ashes is a remarkable memoir about hope and resilience, and a revelatory look into the life of a Métis-Cree man who refused to give up," runs the introduction of Jesse Thistle's publisher, Simon & Schuster.

Simon & Schuster (Canada)

In 2019, the memoir first came out and it became a bestseller. Jesse Thistle was born in the prairie province of Saskatchewan, where his Cree maternal grandparents lived. His parents split when he and his two elder brothers were small, and their father took them into his care. Plagued with drug abuse, he left them on their own for days on end, found food in garbage cans and through shoplifting; their experience then was Dickensian; and I was baffled that this was possible in 1970s Canada.

Then their father never returned. Their white grandparents rescued them from foster care, where they had been maltreated. After that they raised the grandchildren to the east in suburban Ontario.

The grandparents loved them. But they were set in their ways and raising three hungry, traumatized children challenged them. Their grandfather — an elevator engineer — was raised in a tough school. He handed out bruising beatings.

The 'cultural mosaic' Canada didn't exist in the boys' schools; the schoolyard appeared to be divided along ethnic battle lines. Thistle felt uncomfortable accepting a First Nations heritage he barely knew, when it was despised by his classmates. And the brutal social dynamic seemed to turn him off his school work.

Aside from keeping in touch with his parents, his cultural heritage could have been a steadying influence, I think adult Thistle is hypothesizing. I think (or hope) that the child welfare system might agree with this more now than in the 1970s.

I found the childhood scenes, although my siblings and I saw no abuse whatsoever, very relatable. [Edit: Although this is more my narcissism than because the experiences were alike.] The precarious feeling of being raised by just one parent for a while — if nothing else — and of children being left to improvise themselves while that parent was busy doing something else (in my father's case, it was just computer programming!), was familiar. In my father's case I also think there was an air of misery, and self-discontent when he felt that he wasn't managing to do everything quite as well as he intended.

When he was still a teenager, I think, Jesse's grandparents found him with a bag of cocaine. Especially because the drug abuse and imprisonment of Jesse's father had hurt them so that they weren't willing to take any more, he was kicked out of the house. He became homeless.

Around the World in 32 Countries: Aspects of Colonial Tanzania History

Aspects of Colonial Tanzania History
Lawrence E.Y. Mbogoni
Dar-es-Salaam: Mkuki Na Nyota, 2013

Because it has been clear lately that my reading hasn't been representative of the world's populations, I've begun a new project. For the 32 most populous countries of the world, according to a count for the year 2000, I want to read 1 book per 20 million inhabitants.

First, the countries whose population was estimated at 38 million to 58 million in 2000:
Tanzania, Poland, Argentina, Spain, Colombia, South Africa, South Korea, Ukraine, Myanmar, Democratic Republic of Congo, Italy.

It has been easy to find Tanzanian books on an online book subscription website, and I've nudged colleagues to recommend Polish books.

"Kibo on Mt Kilimanjaro" ca. 2007
"This Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons image is from the user Chris 73
and is freely available at //commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kibo_Mt._Kilimanjaro_5.JPG
under the creative commons cc-by-sa 3.0 license."

First, a brief introduction to Tanzania:
***

Number of languages: 126
Official Main languages: Swahili and English; "Approximately 10 per cent of Tanzanians speak Swahili as a first language, and up to 90 per cent speak it as a second language"

Modern-day state formation year: 1964
Tanganyika and the Zanzibar Archipelago merge to form the United Republic of Tanzania
Colonial 'overlords': Germany, Britain

Tanzania is also home of the African continent's highest mountain:

"Eastern ice field in Mt Kilimanjaro" ca. 2007
"This Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons image is from the user Chris 73
and is freely available at //commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eastern_icefield_Mt._Kilimanjaro.JPG
under the creative commons cc-by-sa 3.0 license."

Capital city: Dodoma
Surface area: 947,303 km2 (larger than Nigeria and smaller than Egypt)

Currency: Tanzanian shilingi (shilling)
Driving side: left

Main exports to these countries: India, Vietnam, South Africa, Switzerland, China
Main imports from these countries: India, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, China, United Arab Emirates
Crops that are food: maize, cassava, sweet potatoes, beans, bananas, rice, millet
Cash crops, food or not food: sugar, cotton, cashew nuts, tobacco, coffee, sisal, tea
Main meat products: beef, lamb, chicken, pork

***

Aspects of Colonial Tanzania History is an academic book, published in Dar-es-Salaam, by a professor of history at William Paterson University in New Jersey. Aside from teaching at an American university, he also taught at the University of Dar-es-Salaam.

Although the words 'academic book' may strike fear into one's heart if one associates it with the hundreds of pages of dry or waffling prose that one is forced to read as a student, Lawrence E.Y. Mbogoni's style is pithy and fluent. His choice of anecdotes is also striking and often funny.

He does not write about Tanzanian prehistory — famous after archaeological excavations at Oldupai Gorge — or much of the years of Muslim influence and Arab rule until he treats Zanzibar in the late 1800s through the 1960s at the end of the book.

He writes of the British society in the early 20th century. Unlike neighbouring Kenya, the former German colony of Tanganyika fell to the share of the British government mainly after World War I. His, and later Her, Majesty's Government paid salaries to local chiefs, and had a small administration besides. The remaining European contingent was, for example, big game hunters or gold miners who had come to reap the natural resources of the country; doctors; etc. There were few British people who came systematically as settlers.

I was surprised that the 'fool's paradise' of modern-day Tanzania for British government workers and visitors in the early 1900s, and the 'Happy Valley' expatriate society of Kenya that Ngugi wa Thiong'o lampooned in Wrestling with the Devil, sound so similar.

To borrow from Dr. Mbogoni's turns of phrase and to attempt to put his portraits in a nutshell: a British newcomer to Tanzania could listen to the radio, or become a naturalist. If these hobbies weren't to the Briton's taste, the newcomer could drink liquor — whisky, gin, beer, ... the list goes on — and run into debt, to try to cope with homesickness and tedium.

This colonial (mis)rule rather proves the essential ridiculousness of colonialist ideology even from a European standpoint.

Kipling wrote in his famous poem (1899),

Take up the White Man's burden—
    Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
    To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
    On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
    Half devil and half child.

[...]

Take up the White Man's burden—
    Have done with childish days—
The lightly profferred laurel,
    The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
    Through all the thankless years,
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
    The judgment of your peers!

The question is why this 'heavy harness' and 'thankless years' were ever thought necessary by anyone — except for financial motives.

At any rate, I am perhaps 1/6th of the way through the book; the next part is about elephant-hunting.

"Kibo on Mt Kilimanjaro" ca. 2007
"This Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons image is from the user Chris 73
and is freely available at //commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kibo_Mt._Kilimanjaro_1.JPG
under the creative commons cc-by-sa 3.0 license."

***

Additional information taken from:
List of countries by population in 2000 [Wikipedia]
Languages of Tanzania [Wikipedia]
Tanzania [Wikipedia]
Lawrence E.Y. Mbogoni [African Books Collective]
Kipling quoted from: The White Man's Burden [Wikipedia]

Solito/Solita: Escape and Fetters Across the Border

In June I am going to be burrowing through a heap of 'To-Be-Read' books that have gathered online and 'in real life.'

~~~

But Solito/Solita, the anthology of stories of asylum seekers (and a few economic migrants) from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, is already read. I stopped between stories because I needed to rest. Parental abuse, knife crime, blackmail, robbery of migrants at gunpoint, and so on and so forth, are not light subjects.

I think there is little redemption in the book. The exception is, of course, that a few interviewees reach a point where they are happy where they are in their lives. For a few it is already a relief not always to fear being gunned down by a gang.

It is true that, after their country of birth is far behind, a few people who tell their stories in the book may have found better conditions: an apartment of their own, college tuition, etc. But I think the book illuminates in likewise absurdist ways the social, moral and political vacuum in the country to which they have fled.

*

"U.S. Customs and Border Protection provide assistance
to unaccompanied alien children
after they have crossed the border into the United States.
Seen here is a Rio Grande River rescue." (2014)
[U.S. Customs and Border Protection, via Wikimedia Commons]

Note: It needs to be considered that this photo comes from a government source.
Also: It may not have been the photographer's intention
that this photo be used for a skeptical article.

The interactions with Border Patrol recorded in the book
run the spectrum of positive to negative.
License: Public domain

*

In their annotations, the editors don't 'grind axes' against any political party; or at least they don't appear to grind axes. It is emphatically stated that the Obama administration was more damaging than the Clinton, Reagan, or G.W. Bush administrations, to the welfare of Latino-Americans who were residing in the USA but were 'undocumented.'

"A Border Patrol Riverine Unit conducts patrols in an Air and Marine Safe-Boat
in South Texas along the Rio Grande river.
They rescue a child who is stranded on the river bank of the Rio Grande." (2013)
[U.S. Customs and Border Protection, via Wikimedia Commons]
See notes above

(PRESIDENT Trump, however, published the infamous order that let authorities take children, and babies, away from parents who were believed to be 'illegally' stepping across the border. Whereas law that President Obama passed near the end of his administration was milder: e.g. the DACA order permitted foreign citizens who had been brought into the US as children to legally reside there, and legally work.)

***

— On a personal note: The book describes many acts and institutions of charity, which are all (at times almost literally) life-giving oases in deserts of indifference and brutality. But I wish that societies as a whole were more focused on achieving human justice and respecting basic human rights, less eager to trust to impulses of benevolence. —

Faust in Copenhagen: A Physicist Revisits a Turning Point in Quantum Theory

In 1932 a group of physicists from around Europe met at Niels Bohr's institute in the Blegdamsvej in Copenhagen, in the final year before Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany. (Quite a few of the physicists, like Max Born and Lise Meitner and Werner Heisenberg and Max Planck were based in Germany, as Göttingen and Leipzig and Berlin were important physics addresses at the time). It was also the last period of innocence before their work would lead to nuclear weapons.

Aside from discussing the emergence of the neutron and the neutrino, which resolved important questions about the atom and changed the face of physics forever, they were also entertained by a theatrical parody of Goethe's Faust. One of them caricatured Paul Ehrenfest as Faust, another Niels Bohr as the Lord, a third Wolfgang Pauli as Mephisto, etc., and a Danish woman played a neutrino as Gretchen.

In the late 1920s and early 30s, Germany was no longer associated as strongly with the Kaiser-era imperialist and jingoist tendencies that undermined the moral stature of the German scientific communities during World War I.

(Scientists like Fritz Haber, Ernst Haeckl, Max Planck, and Wilhelm Roentgen, composer Engelbert Humperdinck, artist Max Liebermann, and literary figures like Gerhart Hauptmann, signed a 1914 letter proclaiming amongst other things, in a mischaracterization of the invasion of Belgium, that:

It is not true that our troops treated Louvain brutally. Furious inhabitants having treacherously fallen upon them in their quarters, our troops with aching hearts were obliged to fire a part of the town as a punishment. The greatest part of Louvain has been preserved. The famous Town Hall stands quite intact; for at great self-sacrifice our soldiers saved it from destruction by the flames.

("Manifesto of the Ninety-Three" [Wikipedia] (Retrieved September 19, 2019))

Gino Segrè, a physicist who worked at CERN and Berkeley and taught at the University of Pennsylvania, has written a book about the Copenhagen Conferences and physicists' progress in and around 1932, that 'year of miracles': Faust in Copenhagen (2007).

Bohr and Bohr's guests face almost no adverse judgment from Segrè's pen, in my opinion.

I don't know if the author was forbearing because he reveres these figures so greatly — his physicist uncle also met and knew a few of them; or because he is a rarely optimistic critic of human nature. Or perhaps he was worried about receiving angry reactions, or about betraying the understandings on the basis of which he obtained his material.