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Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
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Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
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Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
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Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
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Forthwrite has commented on (2) products
Guantanamo Diary
by
Siems, Larry
Forthwrite
, January 29, 2015
Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been prisoner #760 at Guantánamo Bay military prison since 2002. In 2001, at the behest of U.S. authorities, he was arrested, or kidnapped, depending on how you see it, in his native Mauritania, on the West coast of Africa, and secretly taken to a “black site” in Jordon where he was interrogated for eight months, then flown to Cuba. At Guantanamo, military intelligence officers and guards subjected him to “special treatment,” a protocol personally approved by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. This included 24-hour-a-day interrogation, beatings, sexual abuse, extended periods of sleep deprivation and enforced stress positions, withholding of food and medical care, and isolation so complete he did not know if it were day or night. His guards wore masks and the International Red Cross was prevented from meeting with him. Slahi’s transgression? None. U.S. authorities were unable to find any crime with which they could charge him. In 2010, a federal judge ordered Slahi released. Our government appealed this decision and Slahi remains, to this day, incarcerated at Gitmo. You are excused for imagining Slahi’s memoir would be filled with bitterness and invective. It is not. In remarkably readable colloquial English (Slahi’s fourth language, which he taught himself in prison) this young, pious Muslim details his treatment with poignancy and dark humor. If anything, he under-reports the brutality, providing a just-the-facts description. Even so, readers will get a good sense of the day-to-day brutality, the nitty-gritty that news reporting cannot convey. Where guards are kind, he says so. And where the U.S., CIA and FBI are stupid and cruel, he also says so. Reading Guantánamo Diary, you realize you are in the presence of an extraordinarily decent human being. Slahi finished his hand-written manuscript in 2005. We have the published form, redacted, often clumsily, by military censors, because Slahi’s attorneys fought for seven years to have it released. Larry Siems, author and human rights activist, edited the manuscript with a light hand, preferring direct impressions of Slahi to a tidy chronological tale. He did yeoman’s work digging through public records and news reports in order to augment redacted passages with copious footnotes. Highly recommended.
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Spiritual Misfit A Memoir of Uneasy Faith
by
Michelle DeRusha
Forthwrite
, July 21, 2014
If more Christians developed their spiritual life with the vigor and sincerity of Michelle DeRusha, the world would be a much better place. Raised in a Roman Catholic family and educated until high school in a parochial school, she heard a lot about Hell but no one in the household read the Bible or talked about God, let alone Jesus. DeRusha loved the marvelously mysterious mass, but felt God was always “out there” somewhere. She had lots of questions, but no one explained to her that questions and doubt were the beginning of the journey, not the end. She decided she just didn’t believe in God. When a teenager, she stopped going to church and as a young adult, embraced her unbelief. Which is how she would have remained had she not married a Minnesotan whose large, Lutheran family had a whole different take on the Christianity thing. Assuming that the elusive "comfort, peace, and security" they enjoyed was linked to their whole-hearted embrace of their Lutheran tradition, she concluded ”that while I was lost, they had somehow, inexplicably been found." (chapter 4) Then her husband took a job in Nebraska and she found herself in America’s heartland, where the question “What church do you belong to?” was part of ordinary conversation. Whereas she had previously dropped the couples’ two little boys at Sunday School in order to spend a peaceful hour browsing at Barnes & Noble with a latte, she now started to take this religion business more seriously. She got up the courage to have a tête-a-tête with her pastor, who did not seem the least bit shocked when she declared her unbelief to him. To the contrary, he told her that her inquiry was being led by the Holy Spirit. Not that she believed him at first, but she did buy a Bible (a formidable task given the varieties of translations) and showed up at a class to learn how to read it. Slowly, slowly she became at least a literate Christian, if not always one who could effortlessly observe the Ten Commandments. I don’t think I’m giving anything away by saying that DeRusha eventually came to believe in God. That happens little more than a third of the way through Spiritual Misfit, however; what then is left to say? A lot, apparently. The remaining chapters tackle common quandaries of Christian belief and practice such as faith, grace, charity, and prayer. Insightful and well written though her observations are, these chapters have a pieced-together quality, as if they were blog posts stitched together into essays. Additionally, her shift from a more or less chronological presentation presents stylistic and structural problems. There’s more “telling,” than “showing.” She sends us careening from a food pantry to the Hubble Space Telescope to the playground and grocery store as she mines life experiences to make her points. At least she avoided the biggest challenge in writing a spiritual memoir: Bragging about your holy accomplishments is unseemly but being overly humble doesn't cut it either. Michelle DeRusha takes the "I'm just a housewife" approach, writing with self-deprecation about her struggle to move from doubt to belief and from belief to practice. All while folding laundry, attending parent-teacher conferences, and dealing with her child standing on a table at the Dairy Queen wagging his penis at cars in the drive-through line. Hers is hard-won, homey wisdom. (She likens grace to taking a mulligan in golf: you get “to take another shot, to start over again.”) I couldn’t help noticing that while DeRusha tells us that, “Putting my faith into action in my greater community grew my faith in ways that sitting in church could not,” these are good works she talking about, not systemic challenges to post-industrial capitalism. But give her time. DeRusha surmounted Olympic-sized hurdles on her road to faith; it may not be long before we see her on the barricades, fist in the air.
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