In Black Gotham and public talks Carla Peterson has examined her role in pursuing this story. She elected to research her father’s New York family hoping for a certain detachment. She understood hers would be a mission in defeating myths. She further understood the need to balance the personas of scholar and writer, and to “do the telling” even when explanations proved to be painful. Peterson does all of this with authority, affection, and honesty as a descendant and an historian. She tells the noblest pages of her family’s history and opens up “silences” explaining, for example, why Philip White, who was bi-racial, would not join the anti-slavery movement. And in her chapter, “The Draft Riots, July 1863,” Peterson has created a truly griping account of these most violent, non-battlefield events.
If you respect well-researched history, and crave an open account of the footwork, persistent digging, and sometime serendipity required to create it, Black Gotham should be one of the next books that you read.
Note: In June, 2012 Peterson launched the "Black Gotham Digital Archive.” Through it she hopes to provide an instructional tool for teachers from secondary school on and to encourage further research in the area about which she has written. The Digital Archive address is: archive.blackgothamarchive.org. Peterson has a blog website whose address is www.blackgothamarchive.org Readers can access the Digital Archive directly from a link on the blog website, and vice versa.
©2012 Jill Norgren for SeniorWomen.com
GODS WITHOUT MEN
By Hari Kunzru, © 2011
Published by Alfred A. Knopf/div of Random House; Hardcover: 269 pp
Reviewed by Julia Sneden
Not having read Hari Kunzru’s three previous books, I plunged into this novel quite unprepared for what I found. Mr. Kunzru’s work has received some prestigious prizes and awards, among them the Pushcart Prize, and his stories and other writings have appeared in a number of notable publications, so as a writer, he is definitely no lightweight.
Unfortunately, it is easier to state what he is not than to pin down what he is. Gods Without Men is a lively tale, but decidedly not an easy read. The story spans several hundred years, as bracketed or linked by Coyote legends, Coyote being the mythical trickster familiar to those of us with some knowledge of the American Southwest. In an odd and at times confusing juxtaposition, the story combines tales from disparate years, jumping back and forth in time to tell stories that hint at extra-terrestrial contact. The one constant is location, a rock formation in the Mojave Desert that is called, simply, “The Pinnacles,” although we do have glimpses of other places and other times as the author gives us short histories of the prior lives of the main characters before they are drawn to the desert.
Kunzru offers multiple events that have happened in assorted years, beginning “In the time when animals were men,” and ending with an excerpt from the journal of an 18th century explorer/priest. In 1947, for instance, we read about a vet who creates an airstrip in the desert, hoping for a landing from outer space. In a chapter labeled 1958, we learn of the mysterious disappearance of a little girl from a group that has taken up residence at the Pinnacles while following a charismatic cult leader. Other chapters are also labeled by the dates, and all the tales confirm that something odd is going on in the Mojave.
This business of skipping around sounds confusing, and at times it is. In most cases, Kunzru does a follow-up chapter a bit further into the book, so that we have some sort of resolution to an earlier event, but ultimately, there is a great mystery involved in all of them.
There is, for instance, the story that occupies the most pages in this book: Jaz and Lisa Matharu are an urban couple from New York who have come to the Pinnacles for a desert escape from their harried lives. Jaz is the child of Sikh immigrants from Peshawar; Lisa is Jewish, from Long Island. Handling a cross-cultural marriage in addition to their demanding careers would provide plenty of strain, but they also have a profoundly autistic child named Raj, whose care leaves them frantic and exhausted. When the child disappears, Lisa and Jaz are subjected to increasingly hostile media coverage, the description of which rings horrifyingly true. When the child reappears, something has happened to bring him out of his autistic state, and he is suddenly educable. This, naturally, strains credulity, and Jaz feels certain that the little boy has somehow been replaced despite the fact that he looks the same.
All this sounds like entirely too much for one not-so-long book. Perhaps the salient fact is this: the pure quality of Kunzru’s writing is brilliant. Trying to keep up with (or to sort out) the various characters and periods in Gods Without Men is more than a little daunting, but each small bit is done so well that one somehow plows ahead, fingers crossed. My own reaction to the skipping-around plot(s) was to put the book down for a few days and take a big breath, but in hindsight, I’d suggest reading this in one or two long sittings, so that you don’t just lose track. But be forewarned: it’s not a book for the faint of heart.
©2012 Julia Sneden for SeniorWomen.com
DVD Tip:
Remember Jenny Seagrove in the British series A Woman of Substance written by Barbara Taylor Bradford? And Martin Shaw as Robert Falcon Scott in The Last Place on Earth, another British television production? Or perhaps his role as the poetic detective Adam Dalgliesh in P.D. James' Death in Holy Orders and 2005's The Murder Room.
If you don't, it really doesn't matter. In the BBC series, Judge John Deed (a BBC distribution released through released in the US format by Acorn's catalog), they form an on-again-off-again passionate couple who are occasionally 'interrupted' by Deed's lapses in fidelity. But it's not necessarily their relationship that has drawn us to the DVDs of the series — it's the writing and acting by the principals and cast of top-notich British actors in the five of the six seasons produced.
The series written by created by G.F. Newman takes on social justice and lifestyle choice issues such as vegetarianism and alternative medicine. High court Judge John Deed has been criticized for portraying an idealized and unrealistic view of the British legal system but Deed has been seen as " an aspirational character taking on a corrupt establishment by the public."
— T. G.
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