Good morning Hank it’s Tuesday. Although you wouldn’t know it from
watching the last month of vlogbrothers videos, there are actually books
other than the Anthropocene Reviewed Book, and today I’d like to
tell you about my two favorite books so far this year. Both of
which as it happens, come out today. But first, disclosure: I know both
these authors. I know a lot of authors and I don’t think knowing
something affects my opinion of their books much, but I do
think it should be acknowledged. Ok let’s begin with How the Word
is Passed by Clint Smith who some of you know from Crash Course
Black American History. This is a book about how the US does and
doesn’t reckon with the history of slavery. But it’s also very much
a book about the present because Smith is looking at
history through the present tense visits to tourist sites. From a visit
to Thomas Jefferson’s estate, Monticello, where Jefferson
enslaved hundreds of people to a walking tour of sites in
New York City associated with the slave trade, Smith
shows us how profoundly the present is shaped by
the past, but he also explores how the choices we make today
about where to center historical narratives end up shaping our
understanding of slavery and race and poverty and much more.
Part of what makes this book so brilliant is its both anded-ness.
Like it is both a searching historical work and a journalistic
account of how these historic sites operate today. It’s both
carefully researched and lyrical. Smith is a poet and the sentences
in this book are piercingly alive. And it’s both extremely personal,
it is the author’s story, and extraordinarily sweeping.
It amplifies lots of other voices, both past and present. One such
person is Yvonne Holden who works at a plantation that
centers its tours around the experiences of enslaved people,
and she notes in the book that legacies are “not just the
things we choose, a lot of them are things we don’t choose.”
How the Word is Passed is about those legacies and how
they are at work today. And what happens when we
grapple openly with them, but it is also about what happens
when we construct false historical narratives to avoid having to
confront those legacies. Reading it I kept thinking about
that great Alice Walker line, “All history is current.”
My other favorite book this year is Ashley C Ford’s
Somebody’s Daughter. Some of you will know her
guest hosting of Dear Hank and John or from her magazine
writing, but this is her first book, and wow. It’s customary to
describe books by genre, this is a memoir, and then by plot,
this is the story of a young Black girl living through abuse and
yearning for the presence of her incarcerated father, but I feel
like those descriptions sort of objectify or depersonalize
the pain and love and particularity of this book.
Somebody’s daughter is so much more than any summary
of it could be-- so much more wrenching, and haunting, and beautiful,
and daming, and loving, and everything else a book can be.
The writing sears and soars, the granularity of Ford’s memories
and her ability to share them make for a reading experience I will
carry with me for the rest of my life. Roxane Gay wrote of Ford’s ability
to “see people for who they are without looking away” and I
think that gift for characterization is a big part of what makes this
book so incredible. But like all my favorite books, it’s also about
big themes seen through an individual lens. It’s about trauma
and family and race, and also about how big systems affect human lives,
including the ways that poverty and racism harm children.
But honestly, there is nothing simple about Somebody’s Daughter,
and I honestly think that any attempt to summarize it or even to tell
you what I love about it only essentializes the unessentializable.
What I can tell you is that the moment I finished it,
I turned back to the first page and started rereading it. I am
43 years old and I have spent a big chunk of those years reading,
and I don’t think I have ever immediately reread a book before.
Both these books are so special. I cannot believe they come out
on the same day. If you’ve read them, let me know in comments what
you thought of them. If you’re reading something else, let me
know in comments what it is, whether you like it. Because I’m
looking for book recommendations. It’s a big priority of mine at the
moment as it says on my 2021 vision board: read more books.
Hank, I’ll see you on Friday.