Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

It is interesting that so many books on the market about white supremacy and racism were published long before the murder of George Floyd finally got white people to stop and pay attention. Surrender, White People!  was published post-Floyd, but written before, just one more confirmation that a book about the mistreatment of Black Americans by white Americans would continue to be prescient. Hughley's approach to trying to get white people to understand is to describe life for Blacks as if it were funny. The book is short, but encyclopedic in its coverage, covering topics that everyone should know. Blacks have been denied access to fair housing for generations. Health care and food access for Blacks is of poorer quality than it is for whites. Schools for Black children are more crowded and less well funded. Air pollution and leaded water systems are more prevalent in Black neighborhoods. Jobs, salaries, incarceration rates, arrests and so forth generate worse outcomes for Blacks tha...

Most book reviewers loved Enemy , but I think it is terribly overrated. In the 17th century, Henry Every, a British pirate, stole a fast-sailing ship from the Spanish coast, sailed it to India, and attacked an exceptionally well-endowed vessel belonging to one of India's wealthiest Mughals. His crew, after a year at sea, upon discovering women on board, did some evil things to them. Johnson does a decent job of laying context. The distinction between being a pirate and a British privateer was rather fuzzy so in Johnson's telling, acting as a pirate might not have been such a bad job, after all, especially at a time when the British government was capturing young men to "impress" them into their Navy. The British Navy, too, was in the business of protecting Great Britain's colonies, which, if you look at them with modern eyes, were nothing more than piratical extractions of resources from stationary targets.  But Johnson expends way too many words inflating the das...

What makes the Greek gods so endearing is their thoroughly human characteristics. They love, honor, envy, spite, trick, support, double cross, respect, forget, bumble, succeed, fail, muddle, regret, and persevere, undergoing many of these practices and emotions in a lifetime and in a hot second.  Stephen Fry brings the gods to life, the ancient Greeks who first introduced us to them, and the enduring legacy of Greek mythology. Accompanying each lively story, in myriad footnotes, he explains the relationship between the Greek gods and the hundreds of words and professions that continue to exist in Western civilization and the English language to this day.  Mythos  also yanks us from our egocentrism, reminding us that our woes and exaltations, small and large, personal and national, are not so unique after all. Being human is difficult. The ancient Greeks already knew that.