Guest Post by Brittany Waite

The current pandemic has impacted many aspects of our lives, especially our ability to interact with one another. There are many on social media who publish humorous portrayals of extroverts suffering under these conditions. At the same time, I feel that many introverts, shy and quiet in nature, feel a guilty sense of relief for this opportunity to stay cooped up in the comfort of their home.

In Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain takes it upon herself to uncover these reserved figures and dive deep into their consciousness, exploring the individuality of their inner-minds. Using examples from history, concrete anecdotes, and years of research, Cain promotes the importance that introverts have in society and writes with the intent to show them the power they are capable of. So, whether you’re an introvert or not, Quiet will broaden your understanding of these reserved individuals, who they are, and what they can do.

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Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain. Broadway Books, October 2019.

Reviewer bio: Brittany Waite is a college student born and raised in Hawaii. She enjoys writing flash fictions but hopes to expand into other genres.

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Guest Post by Elizabeth Basok

In We are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast, Jonathan Safran Foer argues that the science is in: we know that animal agriculture is destroying our planet. Rather convincingly, Foer makes an argument for a plant-based diet stating that this one small change in our lifestyle could positively impact the climate crisis. He is able to create concise, effective, and easy to understand arguments throughout the book, breaking up his points into bite sized pieces that can easily be regurgitated by everyday people that find themselves in a discussion about climate change or the environmental benefits of a plant-based diet. The author aims to drive home the most effective actions we can take against climate change, claiming four notable things we can do: eat a plant-based diet, avoid air travel, live car free, and have fewer children.

Part two of Foer’s book is packed with facts about “The Greatest Dying,” which is an extinction that is taking place right now. While there are many mass extinctions that have happened, Foer states that this extinction is the first to be the result of a climate crisis. He adds, “Humans are now adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere ten times faster than the volcanoes did during the Great Dying” (one of the six mass extinctions).

Foer acknowledges that adjusting to a vegan diet can be challenging. He admits that, even though he has written now two books advocating for a plant-based diet, he has succumbed to eating a burger from time to time. Foer suggests eating vegan for breakfast and lunch, while eating vegetarian for dinner (if a full vegan lifestyle is out of the question), saying “Not eating animal products for breakfast and lunch has a smaller CO2e footprint than the average full-time vegetarian diet.”

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We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast by Jonathan Safran Foer. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 2019.

Reviewer bio: Elizabeth Basok is a lecturer at The Ohio State University. Her Instagram is @lizbasok.

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Guest Post by Eron Henry

Eight men became American presidents without being elected to the office. All acceded to the role after the incumbent was assassinated or succumbed to illness.

In Accidental Presidents: Eight Men Who Changed America, Jared Cohen provides historical details of their achievements and failings. Most were unprepared for the top office because they were uninterested, though a few coveted the presidency.

Theodore Roosevelt and Harry Truman were extraordinarily successful. The former succeeded William McKinley Jr. who was assassinated, and the latter Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who died of longstanding ailments. Except for the Vietnam War debacle, some believe Lyndon Johnson would be among the greatest presidents ever. He became president after the assassination of John Kennedy.

The most disastrous was Andrew Johnson, who became president after Abraham Lincoln was gunned down. The first to be impeached, Johnson reversed policies by Lincoln to help the nation heal after the bloody civil war. He set the stage for Jim Crow, initiating a century of intense discrimination against African Americans that boiled over into the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

Cohen demonstrates the importance of presidents choosing able persons as their deputy.  Not all vice presidents were chosen for their ability but as a compromise candidate to appease interest groups or various constituencies in their party.

In the times we live, Cohen’s Accidental Presidents may prove especially insightful.

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Accidental Presidents: Eight Men Who Changed Americav by Jared Cohen. Simon and Schuster, April 2019

Reviewer bio: Eron Henry is a communications consultant. He blogs at https://oletimesumting.com.

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Guest Post by Laura Plummer

When I first read Michelle Alexander’s groundbreaking book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness in 2010, Obama was in the beginning of his first term as president. Many white Americans believed his election was a sign that our country was now post-racial, that equality had finally been achieved. But that was a myth, as Alexander explains in painstaking detail. Using the statistics of the day, she lays bare the racism embedded in our criminal justice system, which she likens to modern-day slavery.

This year, I decided it was a good time to dust off Alexander’s work, to see how its distressing statistics had improved over the past ten years. The answer was, tragically, not enough. Blacks still face more discrimination than other races in every phase of the criminal justice system—from stops and arrests to sentencing and parole. They are still the primary targets of the fictional “War on Drugs,” which was invented as a legal means to put large numbers of Black people behind bars. They are still locked in to what Alexander calls a “permanent undercaste.”

The New Jim Crow came out before the 2013 killing of Trayvon Martin birthed #BlackLivesMatter, before the 2014 killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. It was before the killing of George Floyd and other Black Americans sparked worldwide protests against racist policing, before Black Lives Matter became a global movement. While the discrimination against Black people in America is much the same as when the book was published, the public support for protecting and defending Black lives has grown exponentially. The ground is fertile for all Americans who value justice to demand a new reality. To quote Dr. King, no one is free until we are all free.

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The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. 2010.

Reviewer bio: Laura Plummer is an American freelance journalist and writer from Massachusetts. Read her work at lauraplummer.me.

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Guest Post by M.G. Noles

Sunita Puri’s memoir That Good Night: Life And Medicine in the Eleventh Hour is poetic, beautiful, and insightful.

The book traces Dr. Puri’s journey into the world of palliative care. Offering a collection of wisdom stories taken from her work with the dying, she gives us a view of death as a moment of dignity and grace.

Dr. Puri is the doctor whom hospitals call when a patient enters the terminal phase of illness. Some patients are antagonistic toward her presence and despise her, thinking she is encouraging them to give up. Yet, she is actually there to give dying patients and their loved ones the strength to know when it is time to let go. It is a fine distinction to make, but she does it beautifully.

In this memoir, Puri shares spiritual and philosophical insights into the dying process. She demystifies and unfolds the process of death as a journey we must all make. In so doing, she teaches lessons about the ways to embrace life until we must release it. And in that release can come great peace.

As she writes, “For we will each age and die, as my father told me years ago. We will lose the people we love. No matter our ethnicity, place of residence, income, religion, or skin color, our human lives are united by brevity and finitude, and the certainty of loss. Just as we strive for dignity and purpose throughout our lives, well before the light fades, we can bring this same dignity and purpose to our deaths, as we each journey into our own good night.”

As we all struggle to make sense of death and dying during this long and arduous road of the pandemic, Dr. Sunita Puri’s memoir shines a light in the darkness.

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That Good Night: Life And Medicine in the Eleventh Hour by Sunita Puri. Penguin Random House, March 2020.

Reviewer bio: M.G. Noles is a freelance writer. whose work appears on Medium’s The Pine Wood Review (https://medium.com/@writinglife). She also reviews books for GoodReads.com (https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/118714169-mg-noles).

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Guest Post by Eron Henry

Information and news are increasingly weaponized. While not new, the weaponization of news and information has been set on steroids by the rise of social media. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and their counterparts in other countries, such as in Russia and China, have become the main source of news for citizens.

It is in and through social media that propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation thrive. The first, propaganda, is a way to tell one’s own story and can be used for good or ill. Advertising, for instance, is a form of propaganda. The second, misinformation, is false and faulty news that need not be deliberately false but can be harmful. The last, disinformation, is the deliberate spreading of false and misleading news and information with the intention to create confusion and cause harm.

Because social media is now the most widely used source of news and information, persons become easily misled and fooled because social media is a fertile breeding ground for misinformation and disinformation.

In Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It, Richard Stengel tells how false and faulty news is now normalized. The former editor of Time Magazine, Stengel was recruited by the State Department during the Obama Administration to counter misinformation and disinformation, especially those put out by Russia and ISIS, the terrorist group.

It was a Byzantine experience. An admixture of outdated technology, ill-prepared and ill-informed government officials and workers, turf wars, career ambitions, ego, and more, got in the way of countering the coordinated and concerted attack on truth and facts, both within the United States and globally.

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Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It by Richard Stengel. Atlantic Books, October 2019

Reviewer bio: Eron Henry is a communications consultant. He blogs at https://oletimesumting.com.

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Guest Post by Brian Phillip Whalen

I’m rereading Peter Orner’s collection of essays, Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live. (What a title! I’m also rereading Jonathan Franzen’s How to Be Alone.) Orner’s essays are ideal stay-at-home reading—easy-to-digest, elegantly composed—and his sparing prose is second-to-none at conveying depths of feeling in few words. The result is a perfectly-paced, heartfelt, sad, funny, and breathtaking book.

Orner seamlessly blends craft analysis (examinations of Chekhov, Welty, Malamud, Hurston, Wideman, Kafka, and scores of other writers) with memoir (stories of fathers, children, love, loss, joys, regrets, the pleasures—and solitude—of reading). Each essay is inspired by an act of reading, prompting explorations into the ways in which the books we read inform, intersect with, and sometimes mirror our lives:

It gets me every time. The way a story about characters, nonexistent people, pushes us back to our own, the people who do exist, who do walk the earth.”

It’s Orner’s voice, however, that draws me in. Though I’ve never met him, the feeling I get reading his essays is akin to sharing stories of hurt and redemption with an old friend over a cold beer, sitting on lawn chairs in the yard at sunset.

We have all done things we wish we could erase, forever, from the record. No matter how we airbrush our histories, the hurt we have caused will, always, reach out for us—like for me today—out of the December rain.”

Orner’s objective was to write about literature that “rattles the soul,” and in so doing, he amassed a collection of essays that continues to rattle mine. This is my go-to recommendation for readers wanting bite-size, ruminative literary essays—and these days, for anyone looking, as the title beckons, for some company in isolation.

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Am I Alone Here? by Peter Orner. Catapult, 2016.

Reviewer bio: Brian Phillip Whalen’s debut collection of fiction, Semiotic Love [Stories], will be released in 2021 (Awst Press). Find him here: www.brianphillipwhalen.com.

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Guest Post by Joshua Lindenbaum

When one thinks of courage, they usually think about someone going into a burning building to save a person’s life; however, Dr. Brené Brown provides a unique, much-needed lens in which to view bravery in a broader sense in her book Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. The writing is a beautiful concert of personal anecdotes alongside empirically-based research. Furthermore, Dr. Brown reveals not-so-flattering details about herself, and therefore lives the practices in which she details in her book. It is a lovely trident of logos, pathos, and ethos designed to pierce into the stubbornness of convention and tradition, especially amongst men who have been taught to not show emotions.

This incredibly organized text uproots widely-held beliefs, such as “vulnerability is weakness.” On the contrary, in her previous book The Gifts of Imperfection, Dr. Brown declares, “vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage.” She defines ” . . .  vulnerability as uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure,” which comprises everyday life, especially during this pandemic. That’s what I think many readers will appreciate about her work: Brown manages to quantify concepts like vulnerability, shame, and even joy. She includes accounts from her own qualitative research alongside a panoply of reliable sources. In addition to providing background, there are also practical steps in, for example, fostering trust. For instance, there’s a section on “the marble jar,” a metaphor used to help us in assessing whether an individual is trustworthy or not based upon specific criteria. This approach allows one the ability to express themselves while also creating boundaries against those that don’t deserve our trust.

I know what you’re thinking: this sounds like a corny self-help book. You are wrong. It is a humanity book. Step into its pages!

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Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brené Brown. Avery/Penguin Random House, April 2015.

Reviewer bio: Joshua Lindenbaum’s poetry has appeared in Drunk Monkeys, Breadcrumbs, Yes Poetry, The Bangalore Review, Five:2:One, 3Elements Review, Typishly, and elsewhere.

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