Books in Brief
Christmas in the South: Holiday Stories from the South's Best Writers edited by Charline R. McCord and Judy H. Tucker (Algonquin, 234 pp., $15.95). Expectations, revelations, and, more often than not, disappointment: The tidings of Christmas are less than glad in the eleven stories collected in Christmas in the South.
This anthology is about as far from a Hallmark sentiment as one can get. Yet the best of these narratives aren't depressing; they're deeply felt, by award-winning southern authors, including Doris Betts, Nanci Kincaid, Larry Brown, and Clyde Edgerton. None of the stories is religious. All focus on emotions that surface during the holidays. As "Merry Christmas, Scotty" declares: "It shouldn't have mattered that I didn't have anybody to spend Christmas with, but it did."
If there's one motif running through the collection, it's loneliness. But the loneliness is not bitter. It's more a lump-in-the-throat feeling. Stories like "The Gift of Lies" take on a more somber tone, as a father tells his three children that their mother will remember them at Christmas even though she's been gone over a year without trying to contact them. Although only a few characters are literally away from home, most feel cut off from their deeper selves and wish to use Christmas as a time to reconnect. That's easier said than done in these subtle and engaging stories.
--Diane Scharper
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama (Three Rivers, 443 pp., $13.95). This memoir, originally published in 1995, was recently reissued in paperback with a new preface by the author--now a hot political property because of his rousing speech at this summer's Democratic National Convention. Those reading to learn what he will do when he's sworn in as the new senator from Illinois next month will be frustrated, however. The book essentially ends when he decides to go to Harvard Law School, and contains nothing about his experience or intellectual development there.
Obama was born in Hawaii, grew up there and in Indonesia, went to Occidental College in Los Angeles, and became a community organizer and activist in Chicago. His father, a Kenyan whose intellect took him from a poor village to study in America, left his mother--white with midwestern roots--when young Barack was only two, had little contact with his son, and squandered his talents. But, as the book's title suggests, this father--and, more broadly, Obama's sense of an African heritage--dominate the memoir. News of his father's death draws Obama to visit Africa, to visit his relatives and ancestors there, and this is the book's climax.
Despite its focus on the personal rather than the political, there's plenty to make one doubt that Obama really believes the surprisingly conservative rhetoric he delivered in his keynote speech this year--a rejection of victimology and identity politics quite at odds with the Democrats' base. The author of the book, at least, is a third-generation liberal, still essentially adolescent, who rather nonchalantly recounts his drinking bouts and use of marijuana and cocaine, and evinces little recognition of the critical problem of illegitimacy among African Americans. Obama's account of his pilgrimage to Africa is equally unsatisfying. The romanticization of Africa is absurd and globalizes the refusal of too many blacks to be caught "acting white."
Obama has written a sensitive memoir, but not one to reassure a sensitive voter. He is honest enough to acknowledge the problems of black culture at home and abroad, but there's little evidence that he understands their causes or knows how to address them.
-- Roger Clegg