American Dirt is a 2020 novel by American author Jeanine Cummins, about the ordeal of a Mexican woman who had to leave behind her life and escape as an undocumented immigrant to the United States with her son.
Lydia and her eight-year-old son Luca are the only survivors of the backyard barbecue massacre of her family by a drug cartel.
Her husband had been a journalist who was reporting the crimes.
Mother and son become two of the countless undocumented immigrants from Latin America who undertake the dangerous journey to the United States.
American Dirt debuted on New York Times best sellers list as the #1 on the list for the week of February 9, 2020.
The novel has been optioned for a film adaptation.
Oprah loved the book. I’d agree.
But many, especially Mexican writers, accused the author (American, born in Spain) of exploitation and inaccuracy in her portrayals of both Mexico and the migrant experience. A planned book tour was cancelled.
Personally, the book was insightful for me. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to appreciating the experience of a migrant trying to cross the Mexican border illegally.
Wade Davis is a Colombian / Canadian professor of anthropology and the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia.
One brilliant man.
A recent article of his in Rolling Stone sums up how COVID-19 signals the end of the American era.
In a dark season of pestilence, COVID has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism. …
No empire long endures, even if few anticipate their demise …
In 1940, with Europe already ablaze, the United States had a smaller army than either Portugal or Bulgaria. Within four years, 18 million men and women would serve in uniform, with millions more working double shifts in mines and factories that made America, as President Roosevelt promised, the arsenal of democracy.
When the Japanese within six weeks of Pearl Harbor took control of 90 percent of the world’s rubber supply, the U.S. dropped the speed limit to 35 mph to protect tires, and then, in three years, invented from scratch a synthetic-rubber industry that allowed Allied armies to roll over the Nazis. At its peak, Henry Ford’s Willow Run Plant produced a B-24 Liberator every two hours, around the clock. Shipyards in Long Beach and Sausalito spat out Liberty ships at a rate of two a day for four years; the record was a ship built in four days, 15 hours and 29 minutes. A single American factory, Chrysler’s Detroit Arsenal, built more tanks than the whole of the Third Reich.
In the wake of the war, with Europe and Japan in ashes, the United States with but 6 percent of the world’s population accounted for half of the global economy, including the production of 93 percent of all automobiles. …
COVID-19 didn’t lay America low; it simply revealed what had long been forsaken.
As the crisis unfolded, with another American dying every minute of every day, a country that once turned out fighter planes by the hour could not manage to produce the paper masks or cotton swabs essential for tracking the disease. The nation that defeated smallpox and polio, and led the world for generations in medical innovation and discovery, was reduced to a laughing stock as a buffoon of a president advocated the use of household disinfectants as a treatment for a disease that intellectually he could not begin to understand.
… With less than four percent of the global population, the U.S. soon accounted for more than a fifth of COVID deaths. …
Odious as he may be, Trump is less the cause of America’s decline than a product of its descent. As they stare into the mirror and perceive only the myth of their exceptionalism, Americans remain almost bizarrely incapable of seeing what has actually become of their country. …
If Trump were gone tomorrow, the USA is still screwed because of FOX News and right wing media. And the GOP.
If a vaccine were available tomorrow, half of Americans would refuse to take it.
Wade Davis:
… even should Trump be resoundingly defeated, it’s not at all clear that such a profoundly polarized nation will be able to find a way forward. For better or for worse, America has had its time. …
BAYONNE, NJ – MAY 3: A wind blown American flag at the Tear Drop 9/11 Memorial flies over the skyline of New York City as the sun sets on May 3, 2020 in Bayonne, New Jersey. (Photo by Gary Hershorn/Getty Images)
She studied at Stanford, University of Michigan, and Oxford.
The Vanishing Half was #1 on the New York Times best-seller list June 2020.
But I read it as recommended for privileged white people trying to better understand the African American experience.
#BlackLivesMatter
Spanning nearly half a century, from the 1940s to the 1990s, the novel focuses on twin sisters, Desiree and Stella Vignes, who were raised in Mallard, Louisiana, a (fictional) small town conceived of by their great-great-great grandfather — after being freed by the father who once owned him — as an exclusive place for light-skinned blacks like him.
“In Mallard, nobody married dark,” Bennett writes starkly.
Over time, its prejudices deepened as its population became lighter and lighter, “like a cup of coffee steadily diluted with cream.” The twins, with their “creamy skin, hazel eyes, wavy hair,” would have delighted the town’s founder.
Yet fair skin did not save their father, whose vicious lynching by a gang of white men marks the girls irrevocably.
Nor did it save their mother from an impoverished existence cleaning for rich white people in a neighboring town, and it won’t save the twins from an equally constricted life if they stay in Mallard.
We learn in the first few pages that at 16, Desiree and Stella ran off to New Orleans, two hours away, but “after a year, the twins scattered, their lives splitting as evenly as their shared egg.
Stella became white and Desiree married the darkest man she could find.” …
Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a dystopian action-adventure novel by American author Suzanne Collins. It is a spinoff and a prequel to The Hunger Games trilogy. …
Critics had a mixed overall reception …
The central character is the teenage Coriolanus Snow who would 64 years later become the dictatorial president of Panem as Donald Sutherland.
This book didn’t really work for me. And the 10th Hunger Games were pretty horrible.
The only character of interest is Volumnia Gaul – The Head Gamemaker of the 10th Hunger Games.
Fans of YA fiction where teens kill other teens will probably love it.
Legendary American documentary filmmaker Ken Burns said the country is “in the middle of an enormous reckoning” and endorsed the removal of statues of Confederate soldiers and the renaming of military bases.
