Harper Lee National Public Radio reminded me yesterday that this summer is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. I have written a couple of times about the book, once talking about its importance to me growing up in the segregated south and once examining Malcolm Gladwell’s critique of […]
Streep and Kline in Sophie’s Choice A recent survey of the Tea Party movement has revealed that the movement is overwhelmingly white, educated, middle class and conservative, and people are now studying what it all means. I love this post Ta-Tehisi Coates, a senior editor for The Atlantic. As occurs in the world of the […]
Daniel Defoe My daughter-in-law sent me a wonderful poem by Daniel Defoe, “A True Born Englishman,” posted by Andrew Sullivan in response to a Patrick Buchanan editorial. Buchanan’s column was one of those hateful “they’re taking our country away from us” pieces, and Sullivan rightly asks who this “us” is. As Sullivan’s translates it, Buchanan is […]
Harriet Tubman, inspiration for the heroine About our “One Maryland One Book” discussion at Leonardtown Library on Thursday, I’m sorry to report that (as expected) we didn’t pull in anyone other than our book group regulars. The good news is that that group appears as solid as ever and we had a very good conversation […]
Let me end this series of posts concerning racism in America on an up note. This past Sunday I was singing in the Trinity Episcopal Church choir (in St. Mary’s City, Maryland) and we concluded the service with a rousing rendition of hymn 599, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” also known as the black […]
Given the uptick in racist language and increased enrollment in white supremacist groups since Barack Obama’s election, I’m going to devote one or two more posts to racism in America and then give the subject a rest for a bit. Today I want to return to my shift from southern race relations to northern when […]
I write today about the father of Andre Dubus III, whose House of Sand and Fog I looked at last week. The elder Andre Dubus, now dead, is one of my favorite short story writers, and his novella Deaths at Sea came to my aid when I felt twisted and turned by racial tension. I […]
If race has been the subject of these past two weeks of posting it is because, as a Sherrilyn Ifil article notes in the on-line publication Root, we are having a hard time talking about race this summer, what with the furor over the Sonia Sotomayor nomination and the Henry Louis Gates affair. I haven’t […]
An interesting Malcolm Gladwell article in the most recent New Yorker has complicated my views of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which I posted on last week. I now better understand why the book, while a comfort to me as a child going through the desegregation battles, proved so inadequate when I went […]
