May 2013
Nashville, Tennessee
Rita Welty Bourke
 
 

Subcategory: racism

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson
Family Feuds: 
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, Helen Simonson

They drink a lot of tea in this novel.  So much tea, I’m reminded of the beer-swilling characters in a Larry Brown novel.  But where a Brown character will grab a can from the cooler, drink it down and toss the can on the floor of his…
 
 
A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
Adoption: 
A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore is a wonderful writer.  I’ve read her short stories and love them.  But this novel, A Gate at the Stairs, I did not love. Tassie Keltjin is a student at a mid-western college in need of a job.  She signs on as a nanny for…
 
 
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
racism: 
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander

I can’t finish this book.  It’s too heartbreaking.  I’ll take it back to the library and in a month or two I’ll check it out again.  I’ve been known to do that, once with a book called The Worst Hard Times, by Timothy Egan.  Set in the…
 
 
Same Kind of Different As Me by Ron Hall & Denver Moore
Christianity: 
Same Kind of Different As Me, by Ron Hall & Denver Moore

If this book is a “New York Times Bestseller and Amazing True Story,” as we are so informed on the cover, what have we come to?  Have our institutions failed us this badly?  Has Thomas Nelson, preeminent publisher of bibles, fired all their editors? I hated this…
 
 
Scorched Earth by David L. Robbins
racism: 
Scorched Earth, David L. Robbins

This is the story of a black man whose multi-racial child is dug up from her resting place by the good deacons of the Victory Baptist Church in order that the infant might be reburied in the more appropriate “black” cemetery.  When the white church is subsequently…