NonF. LOSING MY COOL, Father's Love Beats Hip-Hop

Thomas Chatterton Williams' revealing memoir elucidates how the hip-hop culture permeates black youths & subjugates them with a misguided conception of acceptable behaviors.  Thomas is son to a white mother & black father.  "Losing My Cool" pays tribute to his loving parental guidance, in particular his father's mentoring that steered him to a better way of life and to being a better person.  Obama, also of mixed heritage, clarifies himself as a black man.  Thomas identifies himself as black & aspires to be accepted as cool by relating to the lifestyle of the hip-hop culture.  "Hip-hop is a way of being street-shit." The mind-washing rhetoric drummed into young blacks is "money, hoes, and clothes, that's all a brother knows: fuck bitches, get money."  Ironically, this jargon which Thomas, along with his peers growing-up bought into, is subversive to success, in all significant wakes of life.  While there is much to feel chagrin at in Williams' adolescence, he speaks with a voice of  innocence, sauciness, wit & revelation.   There is so much to recommend from the unpretentious lessons learned here that aspire us to be independent thinkers and universally tolerant.  I am only perplexed as to who would make a cooler father, Thomas' dad or Bill Cosby.      

Trans Atlantic by Colum McCann;Winner Nat'l Book Award

Irish born author, Colum McCann received the Nat'l Book Award for Let the Great World Spin.  In "Great World," McCann brilliantly intertwines diverse lives at a specific point in time inhabiting NYC.  "Trans Atlantic," is much more ambitious & even more rewarding.  The fulcrum connecting different generations & countries originates & returns to Ireland beginning with Lily, a young, destitute maid during the great famine.  Lily encounters Federick Douglas when he toured Ireland to gain public & financial support for the abolition of slavery in the States & for himself.  Douglas stirs Lily to pursue her own liberation.  She crosses the Atlantic by ship to America and the saga of Lily and her offspring commence.  Worlds are knotted together by war, persecution & human suffering. "Tunnels of lives connect, coming into daylight and then plunge us into the dark again."  McCann's elegiac writing & captivating storytelling makes us question what is life anyway.  "An accumulation of small shelves of incident.  Stacked at odd angles to each other."  I question whether McCann will repeat another Nat'l Book Award honor.  The odds are heavily stocked for it.  

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Unforgettable

A pilgrimage is a mission to gain moral or spiritual significance.  Harold Fry is just an ordinary guy whose life somehow has gone awry.  Harold is adjusting to retirement from the same job he held for his entire adult life.  His long loveless marriage to Maureen is exhausting.  Harold is friendless, his only son David has abandoned him and he is adrift in a malaise of loneliness.  When Harold receives a note from an old colleague "that would change everything."  Queenie, an old colleague wrote informing him she is dying and wished to say good-bye.  Without premeditation or a plan, Harold sets out to mail Queenie a letter and ends up determined to walk the 600 miles to her believing that his walk will save her.  Perhaps this may deter you from Rachel Joyce's novel.  This would be a travesty.  Bear with the initial vapid "Forest Gump" character whose naivety is at first grating & preposterous.  His journey along sets him free to ponder the mysteries of life and reexamine his own.  Living takes putting one foot in front of the other "but, it never ceases to amaze how difficult the things that are supposed to be instinctive really are."  Trust this unlikely beginning transcends & marvels the reader.  "What the world needs is a little less sense, and a little more faith."