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This very powerful book may not be Morrison's best, but her exploration of the meaning of beauty in a country dominated by whites is fascinating. She follows the path of a young black girl who desperately yearns for blue eyes, but her dream is interrupted when her father impregnates her. The story takes place in the early 1960's before the Civil Rights movement, but it is a reminder of what happens when powerless children are taken advantage of, and when those children are Black how the results can be particularly egregious. Both are issues totally relevant today.

My only criticism is that the character of Pecola, the little girl who wants blue eyes, is not as fully realized as many of the other characters are. She feels more like a symbol than a real person.

What we think is beautiful has a huge impact on how we value one another and has always been tied closely to racism and the need to make the other unattractive. This comes across brilliantly in Morrison's debut novel.

Applebaum paints a chilling picture of a global juggernaut of loosely allied autocracies that share weapons technologies, poor and powerless populations, a money laundering system that includes U.S. banks who choose to look the other way, methods of circumventing sanctions, and a lot of other horrors.

She admonishes activists worldwide to coalesce to fight autocracies, and suggests these steps:
" - Put an end to transnational kleptocracy
- Don't fight the information war -- undermine it
- Decouple, de-risk, rebuild"
The section on how to implement the above offers few details and feels pretty impossible in the face of the global greed suffusing autocratic governments and large corporations. Its represents only 25 of 176 pages, but should have been the primary focus of the book.

One example: "...the information system is based on a series of laws, rules, and regulations, all of which can be changed, if our politicians are prepared to change them. Transparency can replace obscurity. Customers of the social media platforms should be able to own their data and determine what is to be done with it. They should also be able to influence, directly the algorithms that determine what they see. Legislators in democracies could create the technical and legal means to give people more control and more choices or to hold companies liable if the algorithms they use promote content tied to acts of terrorism."

Well, yeah, but there are a lot of shoulds and ifs here, and I want to know exactly how to go about doing this. How do you convince legislators to change any of this if they are so passively entrenched in a system that often rewards them for inaction? What can we do at the grassroots level? What can an individual do?

Most of us know at least a little and often a lot about the terrors of global autocracies and the demise of democracies, but how to start pushing back at the micro level may be the biggest challenge of all, and we need our best thinkers and doers to tell us how to do that.

I'm on a mission to read all of Everett's books, and I keep not being disappointed on my journey. The narrator, christened Not Sydney Poitier, predictably grows up to look like the actor. His mother's early death coupled with her wise investments leads Not Sydney to become wealthy and through connections he's adopted by Ted Turner and lives in Atlanta.

In a wacky and disturbing road trip through the South, Poitier is arrested for being Black, agrees to build a new church for a bunch of nuns who are not Catholic, and is pursued by white supremacists after the money to build the church is wired to him. He calls on Ted Turner and his professor (named Percival Everett) to come to Smuteye, Alabama (real place) to try to rescue him.

This book is both totally hilarious and deeply sobering. Everett goes after the southern white racists big time, but he also satirizes a caste system within the Black community that values people based on how light or dark their skin color is.

A maniacal exploration of Black identity and a parody of the racist myth that all Black people look the same, Everett engages in hallmark wordplay and absurdity to get his points across.

A Polish pianist is invited to Barcelona to play Chopin. A local woman is asked by a friend to make arrangements to feed and entertain him after the concert. The pianist falls in love with the woman, whose feelings aren't reciprocal, but who is nevertheless intrigued. She even invites him later to spend time with her at her family vacation home in Mallorca (after her husband has left).

This is a novel about the complexities of communication: in relationships, in literature, and in music. The Pole and the woman he loves each speak a different language, so they use imperfect English, the only language they share -- a brilliant literary conceit of Coetzee's. Beatriz constantly questions Witold's choice of words and the meaning behind them; and she prefers Claudio Arrau's interpretation of Chopin to the Pole's; and while she wonders why he didn't actively seduce her, she also criticizes him for being too sentimental; and asks herself why the poems he wrote and left to her are in Polish, not English. Yet she is also strangely detached from their relationship.

Coetzee's sparse and tightly structured language offsets the messiness and perplexity of connection. He has created a vivid picture of the impediments to genuine interchange whether it comes in the form of a poem, a language, a piece of music, or simply in an inability to interpret another person's words. Most of us seek attachment to the people and things we meet, love, or care about, but we often have trouble parsing what's coming at us.

An hilariously clever spoof of pre-war, Agatha Christiesque British crime/mystery novels. I laughed my way through this dizzying concoction of mystery theater and mystery novels within a mystery novel. There was even an errant serial killer running around, whose story was unrelated to the main mystery about the theft of a painting which Jackson Brodie had been hired to solve.

The story ends in an utterly (and, yes, I'm using this completely clichéd word because it's absolutely perfect) madcap scene. Atkinson has done a great job.

** I have to include one quote that is not really relevant to the main plot, but is the best put-down of giant SUV machismo that I've read:

'Wow," Reggie said when she saw the Defender...not a good "wow," as in, "Wow, what an amazing set of wheels, I wish I had one." No, it was "wow" more in the line of..."Wow, so the male menopause isn't a myth then," or..."Wow, a manifestation of your existential dread." Or..."Wow, Mr. B, flash motor. That's a lot of meals on wheels." '

I will definitely remember those for future use. (BTW, guilt catches up and Brodie eventually turns the Defender in for a "planet-friendly hybrid,")

DNF

An ok but mostly familiar account of fascist tendencies, and more specifically, the America First theory, that have run through U.S. history from the First World War up through today. The rise of isolationist thought, eugenic theory, and antisemitism, especially among elites, wends its political and cultural way from WWI through WWII and the McCarthy era right up until today. Shocking, as always, are the many, many high profile Holocaust deniers along the way. The need for far right types to manufacture facts in justification of what they don't want to acknowledge is not new and the author reminds us of this over and over (and over).

There are lots of minor characters in this story and not all of them are interesting. For me the most salient parts of the book were those that discussed well known political figures like McCarthy, Bill Buckley, and Trump, but I knew a lot of that already. Nevertheless, the book was a reminder of the need for everyone living in democratic societies of the need to be always vigilant.

Trelawny moves with his family from Jamaica to Miami where the desperate need for people he meets to pigeonhole him (Are you Black? You don't look Jamaican. I thought you were Puerto Rican) seriously complicates his coming of age. His struggle to find his place in America is a blistering picture of the caste system that exists in the country and even within the minority community itself. From high school in Florida to college in the Midwest (where Trelawny is labeled as unequivocally Black) Escoffery presents a surgically precise view of what new immigrants face in coming to the U.S.

But the book isn't a political screed. The story of Trelawny and his family as they navigate the cultural obstacles of a new country is compelling and feels genuine. The characters are well drawn and sympathetic.

In this case audio is the way to go. This book is loaded with rich Jamaican dialect whose power is diluted in print. The version I listened to is read by a narrator of Jamaican background and it was wonderful to hear.