Book Review: The Light We Carry-Overcoming in Uncertain Times by Michelle Obama

Let’s face it. We live in a very complex and trying time. We’re dealing with political upheaval, hatred and bigotry of all kinds, corporate malfeasance, and environmental degradation. Inflation is out of control and a recession looms on the horizon. And we can’t forget how Covid completely upended our lives.

With all of this, we can safely assess there are no easy solutions, are there? But we can gather various tools, to help us face these challenges. And this tool kit, among other things, is what former First Lady, Michelle Obama, covers in her latest book, The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times.

In The Light We Carry, Obama covers some familiar territory to readers of her memoir, Becoming. Obama talks about growing up on the southside of Chicago by two very loving parents who had high standards for her and her brother, Craig. She talks about the challenges she faced in the educational and professional realms. Obama talks about meeting and marrying a certain fellow named Barack Obama and raising two daughters, Malia and Sasha. And of course, she talks about living in the White House during President Obama’s two terms.

Obama fully admits things weren’t always rosy. She had fertility issues. There were difficult moments in her marriage. And we can’t forget all of the horrific racism and sexism she faced as the first black First Lady of the United States (and no doubt, before that).

But Obama remained steadfast and strong. She never sunk the level of the bigots who tried to degrade her. “When they go low, we go high” wasn’t just a line from her speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. It’s clearly her mantra and a way of life.

But back to the idea of a tool kit. In times of trouble, we all need to utilize our took kit. Our tool kit is filled with various strategies we can rely on to help us navigate the choppy waters of uncertain times.

Like many of us, Obama was thrown for a loop during the pandemic. She admits she dealt with low-grade depression. One saving grace was taking up a new hobby. In Obama’s case, it was knitting. Undoubtedly, the act of knitting was very soothing (the click clack of needles can be very Zen like). Knitting made Obama feels as she had some semblance of control when everything seemed so out of whack.

Obama also has praise for another thing in her tool kit, something she calls her “kitchen table.” Her kitchen table includes close friends and mentors who offer support. She also goes into great length talking about her wonderful mother, Marian Robinson. Mrs. Robinsons’ “Don’t make a fuss over me” attitude while living in the White House is positively charming.

Obama understands we are riddled with anxiety and feel helpless. She wants us to remember we all have a light within that needs to shine. We need to offer kindness not only to others, but to ourselves as well. Using a tool kit can help us access that kindness.

Part memoir, part self-help, The Light We Carry is written with warmth and candor. It will likely inspire conversation. Some of Obama’s ideas and musings may sound like clichés. But these clichés are tried and true, and serve us well. And Obama offers plenty of resources regarding mental health and accessing affordable therapy.

Reading The Light We Carry made me think about my own tool kit that has helped me in the past few years. There is my family and friends, and my church community. There is my favorite coffeehouse, Rochambo, which a visit frequently. I have so many books to read and this blog. Last year I joined a gym. My workouts are a form of therapy. And recently I got back into crafting, making soap and jewelry.

The Light We Carry is like hanging out with a dear friend, a friend who is kind, supportive, empathetic, and says, “You are stronger than you realize.

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Book Review: The Book of Essie by Meghan MacLean Weir

Meet Esther, Essie, Hicks. Essie is 17 and pregnant. Now, many teenage girls get pregnant. But how many of them star in a reality series about a very religious Christian family where the father is a preacher of very popular church? Not many, but Essie is not like many teenage girls. Her family is the focus of the hit reality series “Six for Hicks.”

As Meghan MacLean Weir’s novel begins, Essie Hicks has just admitted to her mother that she is pregnant. Now this unwed, teenage pregnancy isn’t going to make the Hicks family look very good to their countless fans who tune into “Six for Hicks” with great fervor. Essie’s mother, Celia, along with the producers of the show, come up with ideas on how to deal with Essie’s unfortunate predicament. Should Essie have a very secret abortion? Should Essie have the baby and then Celia claims the baby is hers due to a late in life pregnancy? Celia and the producers decide Essie should get married even though she is very young and we as of yet, have no idea who the father of her baby is.

Now who should be Essie betrothed? Celia ropes in one of Essie’s classmates, Roarke Richards. Now though Roarke is very familiar with Essie and the Hicks family. He and Essie are barely friends, let alone boyfriend and girlfriend. In fact, Roarke is gay, but still a bit in the closet. But despite his misgivings, Roarke does decide to act as Essie’s fiancé and later husband with a wedding that will be filmed for “Six for Hicks.” Why? Well, Roarke has been accepted to Columbia. However, the Richards family isn’t flush with cash. By pretending to be true blue with Essie, Roarke and his family will be paid princely sums of money, which will help them pay for Roarke’s matriculation at Columbia.

Along for the ride is Liberty Bell, a local reporter and conservative firebrand. Liberty has her own experience with religious zealots. And once she learns more about Essie’s predicament and how the Hicks family isn’t quite as wholesome and perfect as their show tries to portray, she goes to great lengths to help Essie expose her family for the frauds they truly are.

As The Book of Essie, we learn more about her parents, Jethro and Celia. Jethro may look like the perfect male headship, but its often Celia who is the power behind the scenes, despite acting the demure and submissive wife on “Six for Hicks.” We learn why Essie’s older sister, Lissa, is estranged from the Hicks family and the vile machinations of her brother, Caleb, who is also running for office. We also learn more about the pasts of both Roarke and Libby and why they are caught up with the Hicks family.

The Book of Essie kept me engrossed. The Hicks family reminded me a bit of the Duggars (only with less kids), and how things aren’t always what they seem. Reality TV is often more fictional than your average drama or sitcom. This novel is told from the point of views of three narrators, Essie, Roarke, and Libby, which gives the reader a very broad scope of this story. I initially wanted to hate Libby, thinking she was just a Ann Coulter type, but she truly has Essie and Roarke’s best interests at heart. And despite their youth, Essie and Roarke prove to be more mature than some of the adults. And when The Book of Essie reached its denouement, I couldn’t help but cheer.

If your looking for a book that examines the dynamics of family, reality television, religion, and our celebrity obsessed media, you can’t go wrong with The Book of Essie.

Graphic and Novel

Book Review: The Hope Raisers-How a Group of Young Kenyans Fought to Transform Their Slum and Inspire a Community by Nihar Suthar

With so many bad things happening in the world, I often want to read books that are positive and uplifting. And positive and uplifting is exactly what I got with Nihar Suthar’s book, Hope Raisers: How a Group of Young Kenyans Fought to Transform Their Slum and Inspire a Community.

Korogucho is a slum in Kenya where life is quite difficult. Extreme poverty, gang violence, environmental degradation, and food and water shortages negatively affect Koroguchos citizens. Some people have to earn a living by going through piles of trash, which is very dangerous. And often, the children of Korogucho have no hope of getting an education or improving their lives for the better. Many of them turn to a life of crime.

Two young men, Daniel Onyango, and his friend Mutura Kuria started a band they called the Hope Raisers. Daniel and Mutura wanted to inspire the children of Korogucho through their music. Little did they know, the Hope Raisers would do so much more.

One day, while going through one of the trash piles, they came across a pair of inline skates, rollerblades, and came up with an idea. Why not learn how to use these rollerblades and and teach the children of Korogucho. Rollerblading became very popular amongst the boys and young men, and soon girls wanted to get involved with rollerblading, too. One of these girls, Lucy Achieng , proved to be quite adept at rollerblading, and figured it would elevate her above and beyond what most girls in were destined to in the slums-a life of early marriage, too many kids, and a life of poverty. After Lucy joined, many other girls joined the rollerblading club, and the club started competing in rollerblade races.

The rollerblade club figures out ways to raise money to purchase more rollerblade and attend rollerblading competitions. Lucy, especially, became a very strong skater, often teaching and mentoring new members along the way. And she often represented Kenya in international competitions where she won both trophies and money, which made her dreams of being a flight attendant so much more realistic and achievable.

Whereas the Hope Raisers and the rollerblading club had a lot of triumphs, they also had to experience defeat, whether it was losing a race or dealing with many obstacles in their way like crime, poverty, or inhospitable environments.

But mostly, The Hope Raisers shows what can be done with a positive spirit, lots of ambition and hard work, and community support can do. I loved learning about Lucy’s travels to China for a rollerblading competition where she flew on a plane for the first time, got lost in trying to find the hotel, and ate frog legs thinking it was chicken. I also loved learning how her friend, Chumbana Omari, also got involved with rollerblading and had dreams of her own. And then there was Mama Bonie, an early supporter of the Hope Raisers. Every community, rich, poor, or somewhere in between needs a Mama Bonie.

Ultimately, The Hope Raisers is a tale one what a committed band of young people can do with a few resources, a lot of community support, and a desire to better one’s self and one’s community. The Hope Raisers is never patronizing; it is wonderful inside look at the beauty of one very special community and it’s people. After reading The Hope Raisers, I wish for a sequel. I truly want to know where Daniel, Matura, Lucy, Chumbana, Mama Bonie, and the people of Korogucho are up to these days.

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Book Review: Not Your Father’s America-An Adventure Raising Triplets in a Country Being Changed by Greed by Cort Casady

Being a woman without children, I can only imagine what it’s like to raise one child. But what about raising three children, and not three children born consecutively, but all at once. Yes. TRIPLETS! Raising triplets is a huge undertaking, one that TV writer Cort Casady along with his wife Barbara are quite familiar with. They raised three triplet boys, Jackson, Carter, and Braeden, and Casady documents the raising of his three boys in his memoir Not Your Father’s America: An Adventure Raising Triplets in a Country Being Changed by Greed.

Cort and Barbara met, fell in love, and got married. They knew they truly wanted children, but the process of getting pregnant wasn’t exactly easy (though initially, I’m sure they had fun trying-wink). Having difficulties, Cort and Casady resorted to IVF and other fertility treatments, which I am now very familiar with.

However, there was heartbreak in conceiving a child. They lost a baby early on, and were devastated? We’re Cort and Barbara never going to have children? But soon Barbara was pregnant with triplets, which truly threw them for a loop. There was talk of elimination of one or two of the embryos, but Cort and Barbara decided to keep all of them. Knowing being a woman of a certain age (Cort and Barbara became parents when most of their peers were sending their oldest to college), Barbara to extra care of herself and her pregnancy.

The Casady boys were born in January of 1995. Being multiples, they were underweight and had some health issues that needed to be attended to. But soon Carter, Jackson, and Braeden were safely home with their parents. And that’s when the fun, and a lot of hard work began. Fortunately, Cort and Barbara had a lot of help from family, friends, and several nannies, though it did take time to get the nanny situation figured out. It truly does take a village to raise a child, or in this case, three children.

Cort lovingly records Carter, Jackson, and Braeden’s development and progress from babyhood through childhood onto the teen years and then young adulthood and college. No small detail escapes Cort. And to think about it no details are small. It’s a major accomplishment to learn how to walk, go to school the first time, travel to a new place, and figure out one’s place in the world. And what I appreciate it, is how Cort and Barbara encourage their boys to be unique individuals with their own separate ideas, talents, and skills. Often parents think their children should be carbon copies of each other, especially those who are multiples. Cort and Barb don’t do that.

But Cort does so much more than cover his son’s growing up. He also covers the major events that have occurred during their lives (and ours), and how it has affected so many people. Though very young when September 11th happened (the triplets were in first grade), the boys knew something very bad had happened. How do you explain this horrific act of terror to children when adults could barely explain it to themselves?

Cort also discusses corporate malfeasance and greed. Remember Enron? And then there was the fall of financial institutions thought too big to fail and a recession that hurt countless Americans. Sadly, it seems corporate malfeasance and greed is built into the fabric of our society.

Cort doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, and he knows politics and social issues are very thorny topics. But I do appreciate how he is concerned about various issues that have harmed everything from our political landscape to our environment to the world of finance and business.

But ultimately, Not Your Father’s America is one father’s love letter to his boys. At times it may seem Cort is bragging, but Cort has a lot to brag about. Carter, Jackson, and Braeden have grown up to be wonderful young men. In a world where we hear about so much abuse parents do to their children, it’s lovely to come across a father who not only loves his sons, he also likes them a whole lot, too.

Graphic and Novel

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I Read it So You Don’t Have To: Careers for Women by Joanna Scott

When I came across Joanna Scott’s novel Careers for Women, I was immediately intrigued. The cover showed the lower halves of women in midi skirts and sensible heels making me think of the TV show Mad Men or Rona Jaffe’s novel The Best of Everything. But you can’t judge a book by cover as the cliché goes, and perhaps this novel would have been better left on the library shelf.

Careers for Women started out promising. Maggie Gleason has just arrive to New York City from Cleveland in the late 1950s. She gets a job as a secretary at the Port Authority. She is also mentored by the Port Authority’s head of Public Relations, Lee K. Jaffe, or Mrs. J as she’s called. Mrs. J asks Maggie to take new hire Pauline Moreau under her wing. Pauline has arrived to New York City with a young daughter in tow and a shameful secret.

Mrs. J has big dreams. She envisions a towering skyscraper dotting lower Manhattan’s sky. Yep, you guessed it. The World Trade Center. And she goes through great lengths to make this happen.

As for Maggie, she befriends Pauline and acts a de facto auntie to Pauline’s daughter, Sonia. Sonia has a lot of health and disability issues, and taking care of her overwhelms Pauline. And it isn’t long before Pauline abandons Sonia and Maggie has to take care of her, which she does and remains committed to getting the education and help Sonia desperately needs.

And then Careers for Women goes all over the place. We also get a story in upstate New York, where an aluminum plant is poisoning the environment and somehow this is connected to the World Trade Center. And wouldn’t you know it. one of the executives of the aluminum plant, Bob Whittaker, just happens to be the father of Sonia. Pauline was his secretary and he got her pregnant one night when he convinced her a condom wasn’t necessary. This man is married has a stepson, and there was no way he was going to be there for Sonia other than giving Pauline some money to get away.

Furthering the confusion, is Bob’s wife, Kay, her son Robert, Robert’s fiancée, and the fiancée’s dead father whose demise may have come from working at the aluminum plant. Scott also brings up environmental degradation, the plight of some Native Americans, a factory fire, a murder of one main character, and finally 9/11 and the death and destruction surrounding the World Trade Center.

While reading Careers for Women I felt like I was being thrown all over the place. It’s as if Scott was trying to cram too many stories into one book, and not a single one was thoroughly thought out about in a way that made sense. I couldn’t keep track of whether we were in the 1950s, 1960s, or 1970s. Some characters just came and went. Maggie narrates the story in first person, but the others were in third person, and at other times, Scott addressed to reader.

By the end of Careers for Women, I just didn’t care how the novel would play out, which is a shame. There are so many women who made inroads back the 1950s-1970s, and their stories do deserve to be told. But not in the slapdash manner of Careers for Women.