I received this book for free, this does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review
“But what about Grandma?”
The Swans of HarleI received this book for free, this does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review
“But what about Grandma?”
The Swans of Harlem was a reclaiming of historical Blackness in ballet as told through five women who were at the forefront. Lydia Abarca, Sheila Rohan, Gayle McKinney-Griffith, Karlya Shelton-Benjamin, and Marcia Sells were part of the founding core at Arthur Mitchell's Dance Theatre of Harlem. If you're a fan of ballet, then you've probably heard of Arthur Mitchell, a dancer himself who broke color barriers and after Martin Luther King Jr's assassination, decides to start and build DTH, with a board including Cicely Tyson, Brock Peters, George Balanchine, Lincoln Kirstein, and Charles De Rose. Such powerful figures helped to contribute to DTH's success, along with philanthropists' donations, that the company was in constant need of, but the heart of the success lies in the dancers who sacrificed, worked, and understood the importance of what their mission was. Told in three acts, the book successfully tells their stories and brings you back to a world of the Civil Rights Movement, it's lingering effects, and the reclaiming of history.
He would build a ballet school in Harlem, the neighborhood that had raised him up. And because children deserve role models who show them what is possible, he would simultaneously establish the first permanent Black professional ballet company. Art is activism. Let the gorgeous lines of his dancers’ bodies serve as fists in the air.
The first Act was all about the building of the DTH and how each of the five women entered Arthur Mitchell's world. I enjoyed how we really got to not only know these women's individual stories but a part of their families. One thing is clear while reading this, rarely does anyone do it alone and the support these women's families gave them, made all the difference; it's not just the story of these women but generations. I also enjoyed how, while Mr. Mitchell was celebrated for his strength and perseverance, he wasn't canonized, he was a living breathing man who's personality was formed in a different era and had all the highs and lows of it (colorism is discussed). It added to the carrying over and intertwining of generational butterfly effects.
“We all understood this to be a higher calling,” says McKinney-Griffith. “Suddenly that step on pointe made a difference. We were a group of brown people, of all different shades from different cities and countries. For those of us who’d felt for so long adrift and like a lonely standard bearer— to look around and feel the power of numbers was just extraordinary. We were en masse, so we were protected. Can you imagine the energy that freed up? The freedom to just focus on our craft. We never had to justify to each other our right to ballet.”
The second Act, focused more on the five women's individual stories and when they finally left DTH to move on and explore other avenues in life. Intermingled with the individual women's stories were chapters that also continued the timeline of what was happening at DTH. This timeline see-sawing tripped me up as a reader a few times and I thought hurt the flow of the book.
When the evening’s moderator, WBUR culture and arts reporter Cristela Guerra, asks the members of the Legacy Council to discuss the importance of telling their stories now at this moment in history, McKinney-Griffith responds with terrific gravity. “Because we all have a voice,” she says, looking intently around the room. “And we all need to project that out into the world. Otherwise someone else is going to write our history. Or not.”
Act three and the conclusion of the book brought the eventual closing of Dance Theatre of Harlem (due to lack of funds) but the creation of the 152nd Street Black Ballet Legacy Council. After seeing Misty Copeland hailed as the first Black ballerina (Copeland often works to praise those that came before her), erasing all of DTH's successes, which are accounted in the book, had these five women wanting to reclaim their spot in history, along with the many others that worked to make DTH a success (there's a touching moment where the women talk about the men of the company and how hard the AIDs crisis in the '80s and '90s hit them). Through their work with the Council, new names and trailblazers are being rediscovered and their history brought to light and preserved. Even if you're not a fan of ballet (there's terms used that assume you have at least a rudimentary understanding of the world) this was a great cultural and historical door into a moment in time that helped build and feed into the next generation of Black dancers.
He wasn’t a Black man who dared to dance ballet. He was a dancer who dared ballet to see and celebrate his Blackness....more
I received this book for free, this does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review
When I began isn't clear, but isn't it obvioI received this book for free, this does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review
When I began isn't clear, but isn't it obvious that we always had a knack for stories about little girls in danger?
Buffalo Girl was the exploring and working through emotions and traumas caused by sexism, racism, war, losing cultural connections, and a mother and daughter relationship in poetic prose. The book was divided into three sections that dealt with the effects of relationships, mother and daughter, mother and father, and outside influences, background on mother's lived experience, and finally the jarring experience of leaving Vietnam and living in America.
Let's find a way out of here let's take apart the woods
While the prose was poetry, there was also a telling of story through the lens of the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood. The author draws from the lesson of little girls needing to be wary of wolves and applied it to the dangers her mother faced in Vietnam. While the book mainly deals with the lived experiences of the author and her mother, there was also some historical cultural tie-ins with mentions of the Trung Sisters, Trần Lệ Xuân, and Triệu Thị Trinh (Buffalo Girl), relating to the shared experience of these women throughout the times, the type of violence women experience.
If she couldn't become a new dawn, she'd settle for a buffalo.
Throughout the book there was also collage pictures, made up of the author's mother's old photographs taken, the author's photos of plants and flowers, and drawings of Little Red Riding Hood. I thought the applying of the Little Red fairy tale was an interesting way to explore and comment on societal acceptance and ignoring of violence woman are subjected to and how indoctrination works. My favorite poem was The Furies and a few poem lines about how they were living in America after the Vietnam War and how her mother saw men who would be considered war criminals in Vietnam, being lauded and celebrated as heroes. The anger and pain came through at points, for what the mother lived through and how it caused the author to lose important cultural ties but also the endurance and strength of the author, her mother (her sense of humor), and women in general. Overall, this was an effective artistic expression of loss, pain, anger but also strength and endurance. ...more
I received this book for free, this does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Black horror points a finger at evil becausI received this book for free, this does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Black horror points a finger at evil because those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, just like those who forget the rules of horror are just plain doomed.
The Black Guy Dies First affectionately celebrated the horror genre by discussing, poking fun, and delving into Black acted and made horror movies, from a fan, social, and academic standpoint. The book takes readers through the historical atmosphere of horror movies, starting with Spider Baby's “Black Guy Dies First” template, to the 1960s/70s “Blaxploitation”, '80s slasher carnage, '90s/2000s hood and urban horror, and into the 2010s/current more nuanced and multifaceted Black characters and stories. Along with movie atmosphere, characterizations like “Sidekicks Who Survive” are discussed with titles and movie characters.
As Dr. Coleman has previously wrote, Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present and Mr. Harris is the creator behind BlackHorrorMovies.com and the Shudder series Behind the Monsters, their love of the genre and knowledge was evident. I enjoyed the layout of informing, intersecting, and numerous movie titles given to support and give examples of what was being discussed and then the “breaks” in-between to entertain. The list of actors whose characters gave their lives for white people, rightly had Tony Todd at number one (Keith Diamond gets a very justified shout-out after Dr. Giggles did him wrong).
Horror has a lengthy history of addressing newsworthy topics, from the nuclear fallout of Godzilla ( 1954 ) and Them! ( 1955 ) to the McCarthyism in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), the gender roles in Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Stepford Wives (1975), the anti-war stance of Deathdream (1974), the eco-horror of Prophecy (1978), and the consumerism critique of Dawn of the Dead (1978) and The Stuff (1985).
I've always felt that horror is one of the best genres to hold some of these discussions because of it's ability to explore and breakdown our individual, collective, and manufactured fears and how we work to overcome them. With data numbers given like, in an informal and soul-crushing survey of almost one thousand horror movies containing more than fifteen hundred appearances by Black characters, we found their mortality rate to be about 45%. and Hollywood Diversity Report from UCLA’s Division of Social Sciences, in 2019, only 5.5% of the directors and 5.6% of the writers of theatrical releases were Black, and it was only in the COVID-strapped, theatrically challenged anomaly that was 2020 that the percentage of Black directors (15.1%) and writers (13.5%) approached the actual national demographic (Blacks accounting for 13.4% of the U.S. population). Further, as of 2019, 91% of studio heads, 93% of senior executives, and 86 % of unit heads were White. it makes Ben from Night of the Living Dead and Get Out even more important.
He is thus the literal ghost of racism coming back to haunt future generations. Although he sets his sights on Helen, anyone can feel his wrath, regardless of race, class, age, gender, or sexuality. We all suffer. Hate breeds hate, and violence breeds violence. The legend of conjuring him by saying his name eerily parallels current calls to say the names of the victims of racial violence. Like Candyman, they need to be remembered in order to retain their power.
If you're a horror fan, this book feels like a must to add to your collection. The sheer amount of movies and some tv shows, Watchman and Lovecraft Country (unless I missed it, Ruth Negga's Tulip from Preacher was left out) listed makes it worth it. I enjoyed mentions of some of my favorites, Fallen, Demon Knight, His House, and The Purge collection and have written down quite a few that I now need to watch, The Devil Lives Here, The Vault, and The Inheritance. This book doesn't disparage the movies and characters but acknowledges, discusses, and pokes fun at the problematic elements of some of them, which is necessary when you love something but see that it can be improved. I had a fun and thoughtful time and yes, the authors give their Top Ten Horror movies list at the end for you to compare with your own. The last line of the acknowledgments at the end had me screeching (look, I watched the original Candyman by myself at age 11ish, I don't say things five times, like how I don't mess around looking into street grates) and then laughing, what a perfect way to end a book about horror....more
I received this book for free, this does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
There's a sign resting against my desk: 'SeI received this book for free, this does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
There's a sign resting against my desk: 'Sentimental writer collecting love stories. Do you have one to share?'
Feeling the need to reconnect after the Australian Covid lock-downs, Trent Dalton spent two months listening, connecting, and collecting stories from people of all walks of life about their thoughts on love. I went into this thinking that it would be more of an anthology like set-up, a bunch of individual short stories. While the short story outline was there, it was more of a relaying of the author's conversation with the person/people telling their love story. This worked to string and connect the stories but I thought it interjected the author too much into the speakers' stories, I wanted more from the teller's point-of-view.
Some twenty-five thousand volunteers rolled up their sleeves, got themselves covered in mud and grit and grime, and earned themselves a name that will be whispered and toasted and remembered in the corners of riverside Brisbane bars and restaurants for decades to come: the Mud Army. She'd been a Brisbane resident for precisely three days, and she still decided to enlist. And she doesn't know how to explain it, but something changed inside her during that long, hard, beautiful weekend she spent in the hallowed ranks of the Mud Army. She had been feeling a little broken herself, a little bit broken like this city. 'Then I watched this place being rebuilt and it felt like I was being rebuilt with it,' she says. 'That's how it saved me. That's why I love this city.'
Romantic love often sits center stage when discussing love connections and I enjoyed how familial, friendship, grief, wrong, not enough, inanimate, tough, ambiguous, dangerous, and with yourself love was all discussed, with romantic. The different dynamics, outcomes, and how it changed the person was clear from the conversations and did help to feel a connection to the people sharing their stories. There was a story that the author broke up into two parts, one in the beginning and then end, to give a kind of cliff-hanger and I thought it was a bit ill judged because of the alluding to possible violence, it gave, for me, an almost sensationalized feeling.
The stories ran the gamut of emotional, funny, and sad, giving this a nice coffee table, decorative bookshelf placement for a random pick-up and indulge in one story at a time. There's a little more of the author in this than I had anticipated and I would have liked for the stories to have been less presented conversational but there were definitely nuggets of keep with you moments. My favorite came from a long-time married couple:
Rosie smiles, understandingly, then sums her husband up in three words. 'Seamus is truth,' she says. 'Love is the privilege of being with someone long enough that you're gradually refining the truths that you tell each other. You feel safe enough to keep showing more and more of yourself to each other. To me, that's what love is. It's not the fireworks and the rainbows and the butterflies. We all keep pieces to ourselves. True love is showing up as yourself.' And now I know what love is:
WhiskeyintheJar
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