Review: 'Becoming Duchess Goldblatt'

Becoming Duchess Goldblatt

By Anonymous

Memoir

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

As the cruel people who hate for its own sake take up so much attention, it is a balm to see evidence that not everyone is like that, and that kind-hearted people are still here.

The woman behind the online persona of Duchess Goldblatt is such a kind-hearted person. In her new memoir, Becoming Duchess Goldblatt, the anonymous author recounts when her marriage fell apart, her world did as well. Although it was hard for her to not give up, she looked outward instead of inward, adopted a friend's drag queen name came up while talking with another friend about the possibility of lurking on social media, and ended up creating something of value to many people.

That she didn't do it on purpose makes the evolution of what has happened all the better.

Duchess Goldblatt is a famous and esteemed writer in her early 80s. Born in Texas, she now lives in Crooked Path, which is somewhere in New York state. Her portrait so closely resembles that of a painting from 1633, Portrait of an Elderly Lady by Frans Hals, that they might as well be the same. Her renowned work includes An Axe to Grind, Feasting on the Carcasses of My Enemies: A Love Story and Not If I Kill You First, showing there is spice as well as sugar in the persona.

That Duchess is a persona and not the author is a point that Anonymous makes explicit throughout the memoir, albeit an epiphany in the narrative. The fiction of the life of Duchess, her holidays, the ups and down of Crooked Path, the occasional visits to her daughter, Hacienda, who is in a comfortable Mexican prison for life for reasons not fully spelled out -- it could all be extracted from the Duchess Goldblatt Twitter feed and turned into a fictional narrative. Indeed, it could be quite the epic saga.

But that's not the complete Duchess Goldblatt story. The tweets are part whimsy, part surreal, part wisdom, and the ones quoted in the book fit well with what is happening in the author's ongoing journey. And then there are the admissions, to wit:

People often ask me how a fictional being made of spun sugar and justice can overcome life-threatening paper cuts. Simple: It's magic.

It's the wit and the kindness that have drawn people to the Duchess, as when she tells someone:

The world is broken, but you are not broken. Things may not be okay, but you're okay, and you will be. I promise.

As people began to follow the Twitter feed, they began chatting with each other as well, forming a community. They have sent things to the person behind Duchess as well as to Duchess herself, calling her Your Grace even though she is not a member of typical nobility. Some of her admirers send gifts; the author asks real-life friends to receive the goodies for a few months at a time. Best of all, the community shows the best in others. Like some of her famous friends, especially Lyle Lovett, Benjamin Dreyer and Celeste Ng. 

The memoir ends with the author in a much better place than when she created Duchess, ready and willing to go on in the real world and the virtual one. It's a tale well told.

©2020 Lynne Perednia

Review: 'The Watergate Girl'

The Watergate Girl: My Fight for Truth and Justice Against a Criminal President
By Jill Wine-Banks
Memoir
February 2020
Henry Holt and Co.
ISBN: 978-1250244321

A young prosecutor in 1973 prepares for the most important questions she has ever presented in court. The witness is angry at being forced to testify. But her information is essential to the case, to try to make sense of what happened.

It's Rose Mary Woods, Richard Nixon's secretary, on the stand to testify about the infamous 18 1/2-minute gap in a crucial tape recorded by Nixon. Getting ready to question her is Jill Wine-Banks. Woods is even more unhappy when she is caught lying as she demonstrates what supposedly happened to create the gap in the tape.

As Wine-Banks recounts in her memoir, The Watergate Girl, the crowd in the courtroom was stunned. Even more stunning to her, when she proposed that Woods demonstrate how she said the gap was created in her office, because what she said did not happen in the courtroom demonstration, attorneys for Woods and Nixon did not object.

Wine-Banks was one of three trial lawyers, and the only woman, on the Watergate special prosecutor task force for obstruction of justice and cover-ups.

As she recounts how she got to this moment, and how complex her feelings were about dealing with Woods, Wine-Banks also describes what life was like for a professional woman in the early 1970s. She shows how being hard-working and smart could pay off, but also the drawbacks to outshining any man who couldn't handle it. Unfortunately, one of those men was her first husband.

Whether it's personal or professional, Wine-Banks demonstrates that her first love was writing. She went to law school to gain gravitas in what she would be considered as eligible in covering in journalism. When she stayed with the law, journalism lost a powerful voice. But her background does show that she is a natural for what she is doing now as a television commentator.

Although her memoir does touch on these other things, and she gives a quick rundown of what she has been doing in the corporate world since the Watergate era, it is that period that is the focus of this book. The larger-than-life characters in the prosecutor's office and the political world, the suspense in not knowing what was going to happen next -- especially after the Saturday Night Massacre -- the relentless work schedule and the pressure to make sure all i's were dotted and t's crossed are all recounted vividly.

Wine-Banks has written a timely memoir that brings back the Watergate days for those who lived through that time, and provides an elegant primer to those who don't know what all the fuss was about.

©2019 All Rights Reserved TheLitForum.com Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'Between the World and Me'

Between the World and Me
By Ta-Nesihi Coates
Memoir
July 2015
Speigel & Grau
ISBN: 978-0812993547

For his son, for himself, for anyone who recognizes the world as he sees it and for anyone who is part of that world, Ta-Nesihi Coates has written a masterful, deeply personal and profoundly moving memoir. Between the World and Me is structured as a letter to his son, a young man on the verge of adulthood.

Coates, a writer for The Atlantic who has been helping form a national conversation on the state of race relations and the state of blacks in America, takes readers back to what his Baltimore neighborhood was like. He describes the difference between his black blocks and the ones he saw on his television set. Those people on TV are living the Dream. Their white world is not his, even though they could be in the same city and are in the same country. Black kids, he writes, have to be twice as good to be seen as half as worthwhile. Many of their parents treat them harshly out of fear that they will step out of line. Coates could have died as a teen when another boy pulled a gun out of his coat pocket, but he changed his mind and put it away.

As he notes:

Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made. That is a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them with all the moral authority of a protection racket.

In college, Coates found his Mecca at Howard University. The glorious education he had there, in class and by meeting so many others, is brought to vivid life. Anyone who loved their time at university, who had the opportunity to know at the time they were learning about life and themselves, will enjoy this section. Coates does a marvelous job of depicting how important that time was to him, all the more important because it was Howard and all that represents. (Although Coates did not graduate but started carving out a career as a writer, the education he received there was fundamental to his joy in life and his continued search for knowledge. When Coates goes into a history book-recommending mode on Twitter, the depth of his knowledge is tremendous.)

Before the tragedy after tragedy after tragedy of the last few years, from Travyon Martin to Michael Brown to John Crawford to Jordan Davis (whose mother Coates interviewed and to which he took his son in a powerful passage) to Freddie Gray, and on and on, a fellow Howard University student was gunned down by a cop. This cop followed Prince Jones out of his Prince George's County jurisdiction and shot him.

The description of the man that the officer was looking for was 5 feet 4 and 250 pounds; Prince Jones was 6 feet 3 and 211 pounds. The wanted man had long dreadlocks and Prince Jones had very shortly cut hair. The officer drew a gun on Prince Jones but showed no badge. The officer claimed Prince Jones tried to run him over with his Jeep, the same Jeep his mother bought him for high school graduation.

The mother of Prince Jones, herself a doctor and the child of sharecroppers, references Solomon Northrup of 12 Years a Slave in her talk with Coates. And how Northrup's home and work and family did not matter when he was taken. And how, years later and under different laws in the same country, the wealth and respect she built up and the things she gave her children did not matter.

The structure Coates uses in what is essentially a long essay (the book is less than 200 pages) is similar to one James Baldwin used in addressing a work to his own nephew. Coates has been tied to Baldwin because of Toni Morrison's advance praise of this work, and both this work and Coates are now established in the line of black Americans writing about themselves and their society, and how that fits into what white Americans see of our society.

The title comes from Richard Wright's poem of the same name:

"And the sooty details of the
scene rose, thrusting
themselves between the world and me ..."

The sooty details of what has happened to the man in the poem, to what happened black people, to what continues to happen to black people, and how their experience continues to be different from others in this country despite any laws, any cultural changes, are what keep Americans separated. Slavery was replaced by Jim Crow and has been replaced by housing projects, predatory loan sharks, voting laws, inequitable education and other shams.

 

But it's not just legal structures, or the way banks handle loans or companies hire people without "ethinic-sounding" names. White people still cross the street to avoid black men in suits who are still followed in stores. Black women are told by boutique clerks that they cannot afford pricey clothing. Black people who do not become shining models of making it (Coates calls them the Jackie Robinson elite) are told it's their fault, despite any obstacles in their way.

 

When Coates took his son to a movie on the Upper West Side and they were coming off an escalator too slowly, a white woman pushed the child for going too slowly for her. When Coates yelled at her for pushing another person's child, a crowd gathered and a white man got in his face and, when Coates dared to push him away, was told: "I could have you arrested." Coates writes he felt shame for endangering his child and himself by the act of standing up for them.

This is an essential point to this work. Because those of us who are not black cannot have the same experience, any of us who care about the state of the country need to find out as much as we can, to educate ourselves. This is an eloquent, thoughtful and honest work to use in the pursuit of knowledge that may, in time, become wisdom.

It is a point on which Coates frames this entire work. His thesis acknowledges that the powerful always work to keep those without power from gaining it. But America, he notes, was supposed to be different. America says so:

Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, ...

"I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard.

Acknowledging that exceptional moral standard means recognizing that individuals operate under the burdensome belief of American exceptionalism. It also means that those who expound this belief in exceptionalism need to apply it not only to other individuals, but to the society as a whole. For in that application is the possibility of a new understanding of what means to have those sooty details affect every aspect of an individual's life.

He quotes Solzhenitsyn in this regard:

"To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act inconformity with natural law." Coates notes this is the foundation of the Dream that he refers to throughout. It's how a black police officer could shoot Prince Jones, how black officers could take part in Freddie Gray's death.

Coates says that he has continued his studies, in part, to try to find the right question to ask. The "gift of study", he adds, is "to question what I see, then to question what I see after that, because the questions matter as much, perhaps more than, the answers." That questioning is a gift he passes along to his son and other readers.

The killing of Prince Jones, the murders that continue, the sorrow that Coates's son felt when learning that Mike Brown's killer received the same treatment as the killer of Prince Jones, form the backdrop to the final words Coates has for his son.

While Coates is reluctant to aspire to hope, expressing the need to be honest, one statement toward the conclusion of this work is something on which hope can be built:

They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.

Taking pride and celebrating that pride sounds like an honest way to live with eyes that can see into and beyond sooty details, not ignoring them, never ignoring them, because, as Coates tells his son:

...there is so much out there to live for, not just in someone else's country, but in your own home.

©2015 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Review and reprinted with permission

Review: 'Fire Shut Up in My Bones'

Fire Shut Up in My Bones
By Charles Blow
Memoir
September 2014
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 978-0544228047

The youngest of five boys in an extended family where one was rarely alone, where great effort was put into using the gifts of the land to feed everyone, where men and women rarely stayed married to each other but had bonds that didn't break, and where dignity and respect shone, Charles Blow remembers those days of his boyhood and young adulthood and brings them vividly to life in his memoir.

Fire Shut Up in My Bones recounts Blow's journey from a hardscrabble family held together by strong-willed women to the beginning of his career as a respected New York Times commentator. His story from child to man has some foundational points that show why he is respected today.

Poverty is there, but it is a story of how family members individually and working together did the best they could and, in some cases, surmounted it. His mother is an inspiration in showing that she didn't give up, not even with a brood of children and an absent husband. She made it back to school and became a teacher and an educational leader. And didn't give up on her children.

Her drive and determination are not sugar-coated, but told simply. So are the tales of how the family was fed, whether through growing their food or taking advantage of a highway wreck involving a load of cattle, much in the way cargo from shipwrecks is saved by coastal dwellers. They all must deal with Jim Crow racism as well, which is strongly interwoven into the generational poverty.

Another foundational point is Blow's search for knowing himself, including his sexuality. He was abused as a child and it both scared him and scarred him. As with many abuse victims, he thought he had done something wrong, especially as the abuser was someone he initially admired. Part of his recovery process includes a search through his spirituality, told in plain, heart-searching fashion.

Blow does his readers the service of not glossing over any of his own missteps, including things he did that he is not proud of as a fraternity leader during his college days. The harm done in hazing to both abuser and victim is not connected with his physical abuse, but the way he has to work through both hazing and sexual abuse demonstrates that if a person continues to question, they can find answers.

This memoir is a stirring account of how one child became a man, carrying on the respect he learned from his strong family members while seeing ways he could leave the hurtful acts behind.

©2014 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted by permission

Review: 'My Life in Middlemarch'

My Life in Middlemarch
By Rebecca Mead
Memoir/literary criticism
January 2014
Crown
ISBN: 978-0-307-98476-0

Some books are too full, too layered and so rewarding that they cannot be reduced to a blurb. That's true of George Eliot's Middlemarch, which will enrich a reader in different ways through a lifetime of re-reads. It's also true of Rebecca Mead's look at Middlemarch, its author and the ways they have affected her life in My Life in Middlemarch.

Middlemarch is one of those novels that can capture a reader and never let go. The ups and downs of the fate suffered by the first main character we meet, Dorothea Brooke, so determined to do the right thing and so blind as to the downfall of her own impulse, the way the novel doesn't focus only on Dorothea but takes up the stories of other residents of the bucolic town, the way things don't necessarily turn out the way a reader would suspect but rarely ring false -- Middlemarch is a huge, sprawling, heartfelt and wise book.

Mead, a writer for The New Yorker, encountered the novel while young and fell under its spell. For anyone else who has done the same, her deep love for the book will set off an echo of memory for any sympathetic reader to the first time those pages were opened. The feeling of being where I was when first I read Middlemarch has been hard to shake off for days, and it's because Mead took me there with her own memory. That is powerful writing.

Mead does a wonderful job of reporting on her own reactions to the novel at different stages of her life, noting the ways in which what has happened to her have changed the way in which the book resonates for her. This is a wonderful sort of memoir because it shows that how a person changes can affect other aspects of life, such as the way in which one regards a revered part of one's life (and, yes, devotion to a book can indeed be that strong).

There is more to the novel than the ways in which a reader reacts to it, and there is much more to Mead's book. She also weaves in parts of Eliot's life and philosophy to specifc parts of the novel. And Mead is a discerning literary critic in comparing Eliot's goals with how they can be seen in her writing. She even makes cogent connections between Virgina Woolf and Eliot, which matters because Woolf's review of Middlemarch is the one that is still most often-quoted -- as the book being "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people".

Mead also puts Eliot squarely in the novelist's own time and shows how she was regarded during her lifetime and afterward. The way in which Mead brings this back to herself and her life to conclude My Life in Middlemarch is so satisfying that it's hard to decide which to do first -- read Middlemarch again or read My Life in Middlemarch again.

©2014 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Book Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind'

THE BOY WHO HARNESSED THE WIND
By William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer
Memoir
October 2009
William Morrow
ISBN: 978-0-06-188498-6


Growing up in Malawi, William Kamkwamba listened to his grandfather's tales of men with magic who cursed people and leopards who ate them. He listened well, because he knows how to weave a tale himself in relating his own journey from farming to creating his own technology.


The early part of young Kamkwamba's story portrays a carefree existence with friends. School wasn't taken seriously, even if he wanted to do well, and family are good people who clearly love and like each other. Famine slowly but inevitably strangles their dreams and claims its victims. There is a particularly difficult passage regarding an animal who adopts Kamkwamba that is very hard to read. But he does not spare himself in relating it.