The great reviews keep rolling in!
Engel navigates issues of class, ethnicity, and identity with finesse in her debut collection, linked stories about Sabina, a child of Colombian immigrants who grows up in New Jersey before heading off to find work and love in Miami. “Diego was this guy that I met on Washington Avenue at three in the morning the summer I quit my job at the art gallery,” the 23-year-old Sabina says in her typically understated voice in “Desaliento,” a story about how dallying with the handsome Argentinean hustler seems glamorous and subversive. In “Lucho,” Sabina, still in high school where her family is considered “spics, in a town of blancos,” a neighbor boy with a rough past is the only one who pays attention to her. In the title story, Sabina, working in Miami, befriends an illegal Colombian immigrant who reveals a tale of being sold to a Miami brothel owner and later being “rescued” by the brothel’s guard, now her boyfriend. Engel’s prose is refreshingly devoid of pomp and puts a hard focus on the stiff compromises Sabina and her family have had to accept; there’s a striking perspective to these stories.
Congratulations, Danielle!!
“Young, intelligent African-Americans become vehicles for their own undoing in this collection of eight stories.
Armed with no easy answers but plenty of bad choices, the talented, too-smart-for-their-own-good protagonists are painfully aware of the consequences of their actions, even when they think they have no better choice. The 15-year-old girl in “Virgins” guiltily opts for the lesser of two evils after leaving her best friend in a precarious situation. A young mixed-race girl exiled to her white grandmother’s Tallahassee home for the summer learns a rough lesson in racial disparity—and the power of a lie. A traumatized Iraq War veteran who becomes a surrogate father to his ex’s little daughter sees his good intentions backfire, big time, over his poor judgment. In “The King of a Vast Empire,” a young man who is talked into a risky road trip with his college-coed sister recalls how shaped they both were by a childhood car accident that destroyed the structure of their family, while leaving it externally intact. After being casually cruel to the fiancé of her former lover, the drifting young woman in “Wherever You Go, There You Are” sees an opportunity for both of them to move on, even if she is not exactly ready. But the moral ambiguity of Evans’s achingly believable world finds its best expression in the devastating final story, “Robert E. Lee is Dead,” in which the brainy black cheerleader, CeeCee, jeopardizes her own high-school graduation with a pointless act of vandalism. Although she is instigated by her closest friend Geena, whose future is less bright, CeeCee’s decision is her own. She shares this characteristic with the other survivors in this arresting book, along with the regret.
A welcome new talent—with a funny and dark take on being black in America.”
Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. Bloomsbury Press
[Starred] Oreskes and Conway tell an important story about the misuse of science to mislead the public on matters ranging from the risks of smoking to the reality of global warming. The people the authors accuse in this carefully documented book are themselves scientists—mostly physicists, former cold warriors who now serve a conservative agenda, and vested interests like the tobacco industry. The authors name these scientists—all with powerful connections in government and the media—including Robert Jastrow, Frederick Seitz, and S. Fred Singer. Seven compelling chapters detail seven issues (acid rain, the dangers of smoking and secondhand smoke, the ozone hole, global warming, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the banning of DDT) in which this group aimed to sow seeds of public doubt on matters of settled science. They did so by casting aspersions on the science and the scientists who produce it. Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at UC–San Diego, and science writer Conway also emphasize how journalists and Internet bloggers uncritically repeat these charges. This book deserves serious attention for the lessons it provides about the misuse of science for political and commercial ends. (June)
