A River of Stars by Vanessa Hua

A RIVER OF STARS by Vanessa Hua is a well-written debut novel which tells the story of Scarlett Chen, a young and pregnant Chinese woman whose married employer/lover (Boss Yeung) has sent her to Mama Fang’s Perfume Bay near Los Angeles, California so that their child will be born there and have American citizenship. She and a young teenage mother-to-be, Daisy, make a surprising escape one night and despite some very real dangers end up in San Francisco’s Chinatown. There, they rely on neighbors’ goodwill, street smarts, and hard work to survive. Readers will be amazed at Scarlett’s resilience and (sometimes underhanded) resourcefulness, not unlike the similarly named character in Gone with The Wind. I initially requested A RIVER OF STARS because of its focus on the 21st century version of the American Dream, but parenthood, especially the relationship between mothers and daughters, is also very key and could potentially work as a basis for Junior Theme. Literature circles could definitely consider pairing Hua’s novel with other previously reviewed fictional works on immigration, such as Lucky Boy by Shanthi Sekaran or perhaps Go, Went, Gone (to be read by our Global Voices class this year) or A Radius of Us or Behold the Dreamers.  A RIVER OF STARS garnered praise from authors Celeste Ng ("utterly absorbing") and Lisa Ko ("a riveting story"); plus, it was a LibraryReads selection for August 2018 and the BBC and the Economist featured positive reviews.    

Some New Titles from University Presses

EXCEPTIONAL AMERICA is written by Mugambi Jouet who teaches at Stanford Law School. In the description for this book, the publisher (University of California Press), notes that “Anti-intellectualism, conspiracy-mongering, a visceral suspicion of government, and Christian fundamentalism are far more common in America than the rest of the Western world—Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.”  It honestly was a surprise at first to see America described in such anti-intellectual terms relative to other countries, but then I realized how aptly that descriptor fit with recent calls and emails about the need to preserve library funding due to current budget cut proposals.  Jouet explores the growing radicalization of conservative America and what divides us from each other.  This , too, fits with the news: note, for example, the demonstrations being called for the six month anniversary of the election and a Wall Street Journal article (“When the CEO Met the CEO President”) quoting a business leader who says, “if we don’t do something fundamentally different soon, we are going to have class warfare, and that’s a scary thing.”

In the extensively researched and footnoted EXCEPTIONAL AMERICA, Jouet includes a quote from Tocqueville describing Americans as having “a grasp of public affairs, a knowledge of laws and precedents … and an ability to understand them [which] is greater there than in any other place on earth.” Jouet then questions whether this is still true, saying, “in vast segments of modern America, its people are arguably the least informed of all Westerners and the likeliest to ignore the greater good.” Even if they only spend time on a relatively short excerpt, this book will prompt some critical thinking and great discussions for our students.

In BATTLES FOR FREEDOM, Pulitzer Prize winning historian Eric Foner explores some different aspects of American radicalism. Available from independent publisher I.B.Taurus, this book contains 24 pieces written by Foner and published in The Nation over the past forty years. He particularly focuses on the politics of history and the politics of race.  The first piece (“The Men and the Symbols”) deals with the controversy surrounding American “justice” as applied to two immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. In the last (“Letter to Bernie”), Foner acknowledges Sanders’ role in forcing “the questions of economic inequality and excessive corporate power to the center of our political discourse.” As a side note, our Advanced Placement US History students examining nineteenth century events frequently consult other texts by Foner:  Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men and The Fiery Trial.

From Yale University Press, SOUL OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT provides an overview of freedom of speech and is written by legal expert Floyd Abrams, who has taught at Yale Law School and litigated cases such as the Pentagon Papers and Citizens United. Abrams, too, contrasts, America with other Western democratic states, noting that the First Amendment (his “rock star of the American Constitution”) contains only 45 words, including nine which prohibit the government from “abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.”  Abrams divides his argument into sections which provide some historical context, compares the legal protection in the US to other countries, explains the importance of Bridges v. California, examines the right to be forgotten and the funding of political campaign spending and then concludes with a discussion of ongoing issues like those concerning classified materials. It is that last section which is particularly interesting, since Abrams begins, “having sweeping First Amendment rights does not begin to answer the question of how to use them.” Much to ponder here.
  

 

WE ARE DATA by John Cheney-Lippold was published this week by New York University Press and deals with privacy and the right to be forgotten. As the subtitle notes, Cheney-Lippold is writing about “Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves.”  The cover is very cool, right? And the first chapter explains “algorithmic knowledge production” or “how computers create categories through patterns in data.”  Much of the content, though, is fairly detailed and involves complex ideas and new vocabulary (measureable types, soft biopolitics, dividual privacy, datafied subject relations and so forth). Consequently, WE ARE DATA will have most appeal for those students beyond our high school group.

Non-Fiction: Language, Words, Freedom of the Press

I have been reading a couple of non-fiction works which have to do with language and freedom of the press – seems appropriate with the presidential debates looming on the horizon.

In Words on the Move, author John McWhorter points out that “one of the hardest things for a human being to shake is that language is something that is, when it is actually something always becoming.” His text provides an intriguing review for linguists and others interested in the topic of why “English won’t – and can’t – sit still,” but his descriptions become increasingly technical for the average reader. McWhorter does attempt to address this, for example, by comparing the mutability of language to the transformation of clouds or by explaining that dafter lead to dawter and eventually to daughter, although it no longer rhymes with laughter. He teaches at Columbia University and more examples from Words on the Move were featured recently on NPR.  McWhorter's work is informative, but even though our AP English students often have an assignment dealing with words and their origins, they are apt to be more engaged by related and shorter selections found in Ben Zimmer’s weekly “Word on the Street” from The Wall Street Journal. Today’s topic: “Captain Boycott and his Legacy.”

Indelible Ink by Richard Kluger is subtitled “The Trials of John Peter Zengler and the Birth of America’s Free Press.” Chronicling events in the 1730’s, this text provides a thoroughly researched and documented history, much like Kluger’s earlier published works.  In fact, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Ashes to Ashes, about the cigarette industry, and was twice a National Book Award finalist (for The Paper and for Simple Justice).  His writing about the Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision, Simple Justice, was originally published in 1976 and revised and expanded in 2004; it remains a personal favorite (despite its length) and is a book that definitely impacted me at a young age.  I hope that our students have similar opportunities to reflect on themes detailed in Kluger’s Indelible Ink, including abuse of power, national security, and the need to prove that offending language was “false, malicious, seditious and scandalous.” Indelible Ink received starred reviews from Booklist, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly.