Bookworm: September 2024
'Stubborn Twig,' 'We Hereby Refuse,' 'Nickel and Dimed,' 'Scar Tissue,' 'Democracy Awakening'
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Welcome to fall, my favorite season, not least because it’s the start of a new school year. I always loved going back to school, partly because it meant more reading.
My fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Hightower, was strict and not much for smiling, but I loved being in her class because we had free-reading time every day. One day I was fully engrossed when I sensed an atmospheric change. I reluctantly pulled myself out of the book in time to hear her ask the class a question.
I knew the answer. I raised my hand.
“Yes, Amy?” Mrs. Hightower said. She looked puzzled. This was unusual for her, but I didn’t stop to wonder about it.
“Bedouins,” I announced confidently.
Gasps of delight erupted as my classmates hastily scribbled down what I’d just said. “Thank you,” someone whispered. Mrs. Hightower’s expression shifted from bemusement to irritation. I’d emerged from free reading right into the middle of a pop quiz. She ordered the class to cross out that question and ordered me into a corner, where I stood staring at the wall in mortification until the quiz was over. (Ah, 1970s classroom management.)
The other kids thought what I’d done was pretty cool, though, and I was the class celebrity for the next couple of days.
My reading this month was, fittingly, more academic than usual.
Table of contents
American history: “Stubborn Twig,” by Lauren Kessler
American history: “We Hereby Refuse,” by Frank Abe and Tamiko Nimura
Sociology: “Nickel and Dimed,” by Barbara Ehrenreich
Fiction: “Scar Tissue,” by Michael Ignatieff
American history: “Democracy Awakening,” by Heather Cox Richardson
“Stubborn Twig”
I can’t remember how my book club settled on this title for September, but I jumped at the chance to re-read Lauren Kessler’s meticulously researched and written narrative of, as the subtitle says, “Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese American Family.” It had been many years since I first read about the Yasui family of Hood River, Oregon, and their experiences before, during and after World War II, and so much had changed since then.
Then: I barely knew what happened to the Japanese on the West Coast during World War II. To the best of my recall, their experience never came up in my American history classes in high school and college. Now: I’ve read numerous books, nonfiction and fiction, about the incarceration camps. Kessler’s is one of the finest, with its focus on a single family over 80 years providing essential historical and social context.
Then: I’d encountered the name Yasui only in passing as part of a class on constitutional law. Now: I’ve stood in the prison cell where Minoru Yasui was held while he fought a law that unfairly singled out Japanese Americans, a cell now part of the Japanese American Museum of Oregon’s permanent exhibit, “Oregon’s Nikkei: An American Story of Resilience.” My older son attends the University of Oregon, where Minoru Yasui and three of his children studied, where Kessler taught and where a new dorm bears the name Yasui Hall.
Then: Hood River was more a concept than a place to me, a town somewhere out there in the rest of Oregon. Now: Hood River is familiar territory. It’s where my husband and I married, where our family has spent winter ski weekends, where we’ve enjoyed many meals with friends. That familiarity made the trials of the Yasui family after the war all the more painful to read — such anger and bitterness playing out in such a lovely setting.
When Oregon celebrated its 150th anniversary of statehood in 2009, the Oregon Library Association chose “Stubborn Twig” for a statewide reading program. I agree it’s a book every Oregonian should read.
“We Hereby Refuse”
At a book conference a few years ago, I came across a display for a small Seattle publisher, Chin Music Press, whose specialties include Japanese American history. The cover of their book “We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration,” by Frank Abe and Tamiko Nimura, caught my eye. I ended up buying a copy. After re-reading “Stubborn Twig,” I had to re-read “We Hereby Refuse.”
Like “Stubborn Twig,” “We Hereby Refuse” movingly humanizes a complex topic. We meet three young people whose stories challenge the popular narrative that Japanese Americans were stoically obedient in incarceration, cultivating gardens and playing baseball and holding sock hops while they waited patiently to be released. The part about the gardens and baseball and sock hops is true, but the patience? Not so much. After all, the younger camp residents grew up steeped in the American traditions of free speech, protest and seeking legal redress. They saw that their rights were being abridged, and they pushed back as any other American would.
“We Hereby Refuse” also challenges the popular narrative that those in the camps were all of one mind. Hiroshi Kashiwagi’s story in particular shows significant infighting, particularly on the wrenching topics of loyalty oaths and renunciation of U.S. citizenship. At times, the dissension became violent enough for the U.S. military to charge in.
At some point in the past year or so, my husband unthinkingly echoed the popular narratives above. I handed him this book (and may have done so rather vehemently). I appreciate that he read it. I would love to see more people read it.
“Nickel and Dimed”
This summer, someone left a copy of the late Barbara Ehrenreich’s classic work of undercover reporting, “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America,” in a Little Free Library in my neighborhood. I’d long meant to read it, so I grabbed it. I decided it was perfect for reading over Labor Day weekend.
I expected the stories of low-wage workers doing the best they could just to survive. Ehrenreich concealed her education, health insurance, 401(k) and book contract to work, in turn, as a waitress in Florida; a house cleaner and, separately, a dietary aide in an Alzheimer’s ward in Maine; and a Wal-mart “associate” in Minnesota.
What I didn’t expect was how distressingly relevant the book remains more than 20 years after its publication. Ehrenreich’s coworkers in 2001 were scrambling to eke out a living at $6 or $7 an hour; the federal minimum wage in 2024 is $7.25 an hour, unchanged since 2009, and five states do not have their own higher minimum wages. Back in 2001, Ehrenreich found that her biggest barrier to getting by on minimum wage was the cost of housing: “It’s not hard to get my coworkers talking about their living situations, because housing, in almost every case, is the principal source of disruption in their lives.” Today, housing affordability dominates the headlines.
During her time as a minimum-wage worker, Ehrenreich keeps a few privileges, such as her car and an ATM card she pledges to use only if absolutely necessary. She still finds herself regularly driving into financial dead-ends.
Just bear in mind, when I stumble, that this is in fact the best-case scenario: a person with every advantage that ethnicity and education, health and motivation can confer attempting, in a time of exuberant prosperity, to survive in the economy’s lower depths.
“Scar Tissue”
Among the many observances in September is World Alzheimer’s Month. My family does not have a history of Alzheimer’s. But Alzheimer’s is among the top 10 causes of death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, so I wanted to learn more about it.
A library search turned up the novel “Scar Tissue,” by the Canadian writer, historian and former politician Michael Ignatieff. It made the 1993 short list for the Booker Prize, which describes the book thus:
Michael Ignatieff’s powerful novel explores the bonds of memory, their configuration in identity, and their relationship to love, loyalty and death.
The unnamed narrator is a middle-aged philosophy professor whose mother is slipping away from him and his brother, a doctor, into dementia. The philosophy professor finds himself caught up in fundamental questions about his mother, himself and their relationship to each other; his brother studies scans of her brain and sets up appointments with specialists to estimate how much time she has left.
I stood there, beyond the glass, wanting to kill my brother for putting her through this. Then the sedation took hold and she lay awake but motionless, while a stream of images of the neurochemical activity within her brain flowed across the monitors in the control room. The technicians were talkative. They told me what to look for: bright blue for the skull casing, red for the cerebral lobes, purple for the tracer. I stood there watching brightly coloured neural images of Mother’s fear and dread.
As the mother’s condition worsens, the narrator spends more and more time with her and his father. This incurs his wife’s displeasure; she accuses him of neglecting his children for his parents. As he clings to one family, he loses his grip on the other. As his mother’s world shrinks, his does as well.
Ignatieff writes in spare, direct prose with such exquisite details about his characters and their situations and settings that this novel reads very much like a memoir. It was startling to read the acknowledgments and come across the words “This is a work of fiction.” He’s blurred the line between reality and unreality just as the condition at the center of his novel does.
“Democracy Awakening”
For the past few years I’ve been among the 1.6 million or so subscribers to Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack newsletter. I admire how thoughtfully and clearly — and quickly! — she places current events in nuanced historical context, connecting dots I didn’t even know existed. I wish she’d been one of my college professors.
So I was disappointed when Richardson’s appearance in my city turned out to be on the same night as my younger son’s final Back to School Night. As a consolation prize for missing her talk, I went to the library and picked up her new book, “Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America.”
The 30 chapters are short, probably about the same length as her daily Substack missives, and are grouped into three sections: “Undermining Democracy,” “The Authoritarian Experiment” and “Reclaiming America.” Richardson addresses topics such as race and taxes, Nixon and the Southern Strategy, the 2017 right-wing rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that ended in a woman’s death, Donald Trump’s impeachment, how American colonists transitioned from contented British subjects to rabble-rousing rebels, and our country’s deep multicultural roots.
It’s a book I’d like to be able to return to. Santa will be getting a request for “Democracy Awakening” and any of Cox’s other books.
About Alzheimers, Daniel Friedman has written three mystery novels featuring Buck Schatz, a retired police detective who's got dementia. He forgets his wife has cancer, for example. They live in an assisted living called Valhalla Estates.