[For this year’s
installment of my annual
Beach Reads series, I wanted to highlight books I’m looking forward to
checking out. That means I’ll have less to say about them, of course—but I hope
you’ll share your thoughts on these and/or your own Beach Read recommendations
for a crowd-sourced weekend post that’ll go great with suntan lotion and iced
beverages!]
Three
contemporary memoirs of race and heritage, culture and community, writing and
identity that I’m excited to read this summer and make part of next
semester’s senior seminar on analyzing 21st century American
identity:
1)
Jesmyn Ward’s Men
We Reaped (2013): Ward won the Pulitzer Prize for her amazing second
novel, Salvage
the Bones (2011). Two years later, she published this autoethnographic
book, inspired by the tragic deaths of her brother and four other African
American men, examining what those lives and deaths can help us see about identity,
community, and culture in 21st century America. Seems like a perfect
complement to Salvage, and I can’t
wait to read the results of Ward turning her prodigious talents to nonfiction.
2)
Charles Blow’s Fire
Shut Up in My Bones (2014): Blow’s New York Times column deals with issues of race and
ethnicity in America (among other topics) with an honesty and rigor matched by
few fellow journalists. He’s already written a good bit about autobiographical
topics in that space, as exemplified by this stunning piece on the illegitimate
detention of his son by New Haven police. But Fire delves far deeper into Blow’s personal past and what it can
help us understand about contemporary America, and I look forward to seeing
where he takes his readers in this first longer-form work.
3)
Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s Undocumented:
A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League (2015):
I know the least about this book of these three, as it had largely been off my
radar until I saw it on a new books shelf at the newly renovated, wonderful Fitchburg State
University library. So I’ll just note that it looks like not only a
compelling and inspiring individual story, but a great complement to the life
and work of one of the most impressive contemporary Americans, Jose
Antonio Vargas. Can’t wait to see what Peralta can add to the conversation!
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So one more
time: thoughts on this book? Other Beach Reads you’d share?
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