Kingsolver
is so clever in this book, transplanting the framework of David Copperfield to
the 21st-century hills of eastern Kentucky.
Despite the heavy
subject matter, opioid addiction, poverty, the foster care system, it is an
entertaining, at times even funny, read. Eastern Kentucky is often written off
as “hillbilly” and backward, but this book makes you empathize with the characters,
understand their limited (often poor) choices, and appreciate their resilience
in the face of all the forces working against them.
Demon's story begins with his traumatic birth to a single mother in a single-wide trailer, looking 'like a little blue prizefighter.' For the life ahead of him he would need all of that fighting spirit, along with buckets of charm, a quick wit, and some unexpected talents, legal and otherwise.
In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, poverty isn't an idea, it's as natural as the grass grows. For a generation growing up in this world, at the heart of the modern opioid crisis, addiction isn't an abstraction, it's neighbours, parents, and friends. 'Family' could mean love, or reluctant foster…
It
is a ritual in Kentucky to sing “My Old Kentucky Home” every year at the
Kentucky Derby. I just never knew how fraught and controversial that seemingly
harmless ritual was before reading this book.
Bingham traces the song back through
its genesis in Stephen Foster’s pen, its career as a staple of blackface
minstrelsy, the campaign of balderdash and hoopla that led to the “My Old
Kentucky Home” state park, and the racial controversies that have surrounded
the song since the 1920s.
Amid all these controversies, white people have
routinely insisted that it’s “just a song”; by uncovering its complicated
history, Bingham showed me that it is more than that.
The long journey of an American song, passed down from generation to generation, bridging a nation’s fraught disconnect between history and warped illusion, revealing the country's ever evolving self.
MY OLD KENTUCKY HOME, from its enormous success in the early 1850s, written by a white man, considered the father of American music, about a Black man being sold downriver, performed for decades by white men in blackface, and the song, an anthem of longing and pain, turned upside down and, over time, becoming a celebration of happy plantation life.
It is the state song of Kentucky, a song that has…
I have long been interested in Native American
history (I even wrote my dissertation on it), but for a long time, I had a
typically American ignorance of Canadian history.
I had a general sense that
Canada had treated their indigenous population “better” than the United States
had. This book blows that general sense to smithereens.
Once the Canadian
government decided that they wanted white settlers on the plains of Canada,
they undertook a deliberate campaign of isolation, starvation, and abrogation
of treaty promises to clear those lands of Native people.
It is a depressing
story backed up with a trove of research. It created quite a stir in Canada
when it was first released, but Daschuk’s conclusions have since been reinforced
with the recent revelations about the horrors of Indian boarding schools in
Canada.
In arresting, but harrowing, prose, James Daschuk examines the roles that Old World diseases, climate, and, most disturbingly, Canadian politics--the politics of ethnocide--played in the deaths and subjugation of thousands of aboriginal people in the realization of Sir John A. Macdonald's "National Dream." It was a dream that came at great expense: the present disparity in health and economic well-being between First Nations and non-Native populations, and the lingering racism and misunderstanding that permeates the national consciousness to this day. " Clearing the Plains is a tour de force that dismantles and destroys the view that Canada has a special…
For the last third of the nineteenth century, Union General Stephen Gano Burbridge enjoyed the unenviable distinction of being the most hated man in Kentucky.
From mid-1864, just months into his reign as the military commander of the state, until his death in December 1894, the mere mention of his name triggered a firestorm of curses from editorialists and politicians.
By the end of Burbridge's tenure, Governor Thomas E. Bramlette concluded that he was an "imbecile commander" whose actions represented nothing but the "blundering of a weak intellect and an overwhelming vanity." In this revealing biography, Brad Asher explores how Burbridge earned his infamous reputation and adds an important new layer to the ongoing reexamination of Kentucky during and after the Civil War.
