After three months on furlough, I was scared to gear up again. I had forgotten how to use a zipper; stopped even bothering with lip gloss for Zoom. I was not sure my adrenal glands still functioned. Taking permission from catastrophe, I ate, drank, and slept as I chose, cheesecake…
Jeff Guinn’s light-hearted prose takes the reader back to the early twentieth century. The book reads like a musical fugue: Its continuous theme is the annual trip; the variations, the uniqueness of each outing.
Author Yunte Huang underscores throughout Inseparable the extent to which Chang and Eng Bunker valued their privacy, not to mention their struggles to live their adult years far from the stage.
What exactly does it mean to say that a book will tell us Who We Are and How We Got Here? The immediate tendency is to conclude that the author really thinks, in the most reductive sense, that the “open sesame” code that will release the answers to human questions of identity is buried in our DNA.
Unfortunately, despite our accomplishments, we are victimized by institutional racism. It is a deadly virus in its own right, founded on a social construct of white supremacy and fabricated to justify mass oppression of people of color, it plagues many of our lives. It is also pervasive in medicine, where practitioners double down, often insisting they are color-blind, and in education, where faculty and administrators find multiple reasons not to diversify colleagues or curriculum.
Frederick Douglass saw the Fourth as a mockery, because he was still a slave, but slave poet George Moses Horton saw Independence Day as one to be celebrated as a victory for all. As indeed it was.
The plan was to go back to Saigon for a second tour, but we never did due to the war, the subsequent embargo, and the dissolution of my family. My mother kept the beauty of Vietnam and its people vivid before my eyes, like a sandalwood-scented dream.
Ghosts is a drama of many themes. At its core, though, is the idea of “sickness” as the inexorable tide we push for, or against. It is the one drama—dare it be said, the only?—wherein “sickness” becomes the widest possible metaphor not just for disease, but inherited social convention, accepted ideology, and the crucible of family without which we cannot survive, but in which we can also decay and die.
"The Common Reader," Washington University in St. Louis's Journal of the Essay, explores life and learning during the onset of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.
Melting under conditions of extreme heat is only undertaken with considerable suffering and loss, but generations of white Americans have felt the loss of forgetting to be worth it, if not a little bit because they would rather be what is melted than the pot.