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.

December 2020 In Books: What We'll Be Reading Next, Part II

It is only 16 days until 2020 is over and my chance to read the 25 books I promised to read for Goodreads has passed. But in the meantime I am still 'cramming in' more books. Aside from listening to Alien Oceans to the very end, I also finished listening to the audiobook recording of Brian Stelter's Hoax.

***

Trembling on the verge of the passing of the Trump presidency as we are, any non-fiction book centred on the 45th President runs the risk of anachronism. But I think that Hoax bypasses the risk.

Brian Stelter begins with the President but ends up largely discussing Fox News, and the President is only an especially noisy watcher.

"Rupert Murdoch - World Economic Forum Annual Meeting Davos 2007."
Copyright World Economic Forum (CC-BY-SA-2.0)

It makes sense anyway that the book's focus would be on television rather than governance: Stelter once ran the website TVNewser and now commentates the American press on CNN's show Reliable Sources. He is a media reporter through and through, and says of himself that he has tracked Fox News for 16 years.

But also, to borrow a phrase from the comedian Stephen Colbert and his former show Colbert Report, often American politics are more 'Videri quam esse' — seeming than being.

The 45th President took this motto more to heart than most: he was, as others have said, a television president.

He set aside 'executive time' in which he watched Fox and Friends and other political television when he should have been doing presidential tasks. If people wanted to influence him or to be hired by him, they would angle to appear on Fox rather than meet him in person. Long before he ran for office, he would feed stories to journalists and be credited as a 'source close to Trump.' He was altogether obsessed with ratings and with fans, rather than with sound policy and consensus. Stelter doesn't mention it directly as far as I recall; but it was quite sick that Trump reportedly used to track how popular his coronavirus briefings were, as if they were a television soap opera. ("Trump, Citing TV Ratings, Says Daily Coronavirus Briefings Will Resume" [New York Magazine])

It appeared that he had never grown out of his reality show, The Apprentice.

And, of course, the real estate magnate-turned-politician also took to heart the idea of 'seeming rather than being' when he fudged 'facts.'

Stelter recapitulates more trivial controversies that showed Trump's mendacious tendencies, like the 'crowd size' debate at the presidential inauguration in 2017.

But the main controversy that clearly weighs most on Stelter's mind is the Administration's and Fox's poor approach to the coronavirus pandemic. Even as the first doses of a vaccine are being distributed there, beginning yesterday, it is worth keeping in mind that as of December 13th, 2020, the US suffered 16,062,299 confirmed cases, with 297,818 residents dying with Covid-19, according to 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. —