I know someone - a good friend of my good friend - who used booster seats till the 10-12 age. She and her husband are both pediatricians in Utah, so I guess are aware of guidelines. Anyway that’s how I know what the AAP guidelines are; I remember being surprised.
@ignatius is correct about the reason for a cassette player. Ben Winters said in the Spotlight interview that it’s because CD technology is Japanese, and Japan is one of the countries that will not do business with the U.S. He said there are several small details like that in the book, but he didn’t waste words explaining them because he didn’t want the novel to become too clever or gimmicky and overshadow the more important story.
- How do Cora’s challenges in North Carolina mirror what America is still struggling with today?
- When speaking of Valentine’s Farm, Cora explains “Even if the adults were free of the shackles that held them fast, bondage had stolen too much time. Only the children could take full advantage of their dreaming. If the white men let them.” What makes this so impactful both in the novel and today?
Today I read a NYT opinion piece by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (linked below) in which he argues that the history of Africa in this country, and therefore an accompanying heritage that should be precious to the majority of African Americans today, has been gradually relegated to the dusty archives of world history, or worse, whitewashed out of the collective memory of African descendants. It’s another consequence of slavery I’d never considered.
Very interesting article, thanks @PlantMom. I was just thinking about Henry Louis Gates, Jr. the other day, when I read Colson Whitehead’s comments about stop-and-frisk being a shared experience among black men in America. I was remembering Gates being arrested outside his own house on suspicion of breaking in. (He was trying to force open a jammed front door.) It generated a lot of discussion about the assumptions police make about black men.
Later, both Gates and the officer involved went to the White House and shared a beer with President Obama: “Obama characterized the meeting as ‘having a drink at the end of the day and hopefully giving people an opportunity to listen to each other.’” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/30/AR2009073003563.html
Improving race relations in this country always seems to be one step forward, two steps back.
[quote]
Interesting though that he has an older photo of an ancestor than any I’ve seen of my family! And on my mother’s side we came over shortly after the Mayflower. (My father’s father though came through Ellis Island.)
I liked that point that the slaves couldn’t ever fully overcome their bondage.
I read both books on my brand new Kindle. Haven’t really worked out the kinks in terms of being able to mark things I thought were interesting. I felt like I wasn’t really digesting the books quite as well.
I haven’t listened to a book since our days of long car trips with the kids - I found the readers made a lot of difference in how I felt about the books.
I was just thinking about something related to Underground Railroad. There is so much killing. I have to assume that this is accurate to some degree.
I guess I wasn’t surprised that a returned runaway slave would likely be killed as an example to others. Their owners perhaps thought that a returned runaway had no value as a worker?
But I didn’t realize that white people who helped slaves escape, hide, etc, would be killed and/or their property destroyed.
Am I just naive? Could Whitehead have been exaggerating to any extent?
Was the murder of white people helping slaves to escape not considered a crime punishable by law?
I viewed North Carolina as an exaggeration, with its daily lynching on the town square, but (as with everything in this book), I think that was done purposefully, a microcosm of horror that reflected the mentality of the times.
Sadly though, it may not have been too much of an exaggeration; I’m not sure there was a lot of “due process” during that era:
Things I’m learning enroute to looking up other things…
I think the lynching in NC in the book was weekly, rather than daily, but still…
I got so caught up in Whitehead’s world (believing the basics of what he was trying to convey) that I didn’t question some things enough, I guess.
Oh yeah, Elijah Lovejoy! He attended Colby College (ME). As an alum, he’s part of the school lore we learn about; he was the first martyr to the freedom of the press. “Every year Colby gives out the Lovejoy Award: Colby’s Lovejoy Award, established in 1952, honors a member of the newspaper profession who continues Elijah Parish Lovejoy’s heritage of fearlessness and freedom. The recipient may be an editor, reporter, or publisher who has contributed to the nation’s journalistic achievement. Criteria include integrity, craftsmanship, character, intelligence, and courage.”
That was totally me as well. In the review I posted earlier, the writer observes about The Underground Railroad:
What I got out of that New Yorker article was that far fewer slaves were helped by the real Underground Railroad than is generally believed, and that white people have been disproportionately praised for their roles.
The statement that ignatius quoted about few whites having been murdered somehow didn’t sink in!
And therein lies my annoyance (not with @NJTheatreMOM): As I said earlier, Whitehead writes exquisitely and his creativity amazes me but The Underground Railroad reads as factual. The reader needs to already know the history, or as @NJTheatreMOM points out, be willing to question things, for Whitehead’s work to become more than what it appears to be on its surface. I don’t know how I feel about this - hence, my annoyance. I’m far from the only one.
Random review on Goodreads:
My question then becomes whether it should be hard - or at least, that hard. Winters Underground Airlines makes his points known without obfuscating the reader. Anyway, I like The Underground Railroad, but I have reservations about the … manipulation, maybe.
Yes, but I found the whole first section of Underground Airlines to be pretty confusing. It wasn’t until Kevin was found and identified that the story started to make a little bit of sense. And WHY was Kevin being hidden in that weird underground location adjacent to “Slim’s Place”? Slim could not possibly have been sympathetic.
Also:
Whatever made it occur to Martha to go to Freedman’s Town to try to borrow money? We were never told.
The whole sequence with Billy the driver at GGSI seemed quite muddled to me.
When the cop Cook turned out to be working for the same outfit as Victor, you could have knocked me over with a feather.
etc, etc.
^^^ But you never lost sight of the fact that it was fiction.
Hmm … your questions:
I assume Martha landed in that city due to a lead re help in Freedman’s Town. She needed to arrange it.
I understood the Billy the driver sequence.
The twist with Cook surprised me but I liked it. You’d think you know what’s to happen next only to have your suppositions turned on you. I’m kinda like “Kudos to Winters for the twists and turns.”
Someone else may answer your questions better than I can, as I’m leaving for the day.
Good point.
Catching up on old NYT book reviews I came across the review for Blood on the Root about a county in Georgia that killed or drove away all the African-Americans who lived there. Thought right away of Underground Railroad
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/books/review/blood-at-the-root-patrick-phillips.html
And a Teri Gross interview.
I had trouble following the intricacies of the Airplane plot too, but I’ve never been too good at really paying attention when I get caught up in a story.
@ignatius, I completely agree with your post #152.
@NJTheatreMOM, Martha tells Mama Walker that she found out about her through “My friend Anika, she knows your grandson Wayne” (p. 142). That connection doesn’t work in Martha’s favor because Mama says that Wayne is actually no kin to her, and he is “Dumb and small-minded, too. There’s a difference, but he both. Stay clear.”
But even with that explained, there is still an aura of mystery about Mama Walker’s operation. I guess that’s okay–an author doesn’t have to provide every backstory–but I was curious. At first, Mama seems like she might not be such a bad person (e.g., the advice about Wayne), but by the end of the conversation, there is much more menace:
Wow. There’s an embedded link in the NYT book review @mathmom posted of an early Oprah show taped in Forsyth County in 1987. Talk about hate.
^ Wow, indeed. Just read the review and watched the Oprah clip. (The reviewer called Oprah’s composure “a marvel and a reproach” – more of the former than the latter in my opinion.) I’d like to think that 30 years later, some of the audience members have had a change of heart, but…it’s not likely, is it? I suspect I could accurately guess where most of them stand in 2017. (Interesting to hear a white supremacist circa 1987 accuse the news media of deliberately covering up the truth about how the people “really” feel.)
As @mathmom wrote above, the similarities between Forsyth County and Colson Whitehead’s North Carolina are striking: