Studies of Christian missions can easily fall into two different traps: either one-sidedly presenting the missionaries as heroes saving benighted savages or portraying them as villains carrying out cultural imperialism. At the same time, these vastly different perspectives are based on the same error of minimizing native agency. In The...
World Book Club visits the home of the Pulitzer-Prize winning author Anne Tyler, in the city of Baltimore. From her spare, elegant writing room Anne talks to Harriett Gilbert about her own personal favourite novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.
Abandoned by her salesman husband, fierce, sometimes cruel matriarch, Pearl is left to bring up her three children alone - Cody, a flawed charmer, Ezra, a flawed saint, and Jenny, errant and intense. Now as Pearl lies dying with her children around her, the past is unlocked, each character with their own searing take on it.
In 2012, a young Cherokee girl named Veronica became famous. The widespread and often coercive adoption and fostering of Indigenous children by non-Native families has long been known, discussed, and challenged in Indian Country. Now, because of an interview on Dr. Phil with the white South Carolina couple seeking to adopt Veronica, the issue went national.
Veronica’s mother had agreed to the adoption, but her father, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, wanted to raise her. And according to the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 (ICWA), Indian children should grow up in Indian families whenever possible.
The Supreme Court disagreed. In a 5-4 decision in June 2013, they remanded the case to the South Carolina Supreme Court, who promptly placed Veronica with the white couple.
This story opens Margaret D. Jacobs’ new book, A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). But instead of trading in the shallow myths that characterized mainstream media coverage of the “Baby Veronica” case, Jacobs offers a nuanced and often troubling history that puts such incidents in context, documenting the mid-century explosion of adoption and fostering of Indigenous children by white families, not only in the United States but other settler colonial countries like Australia and Canada.
Jacobs’ book is one of trauma and violence, but also of courage and resistance, as Indigenous families struggled to reclaim the care of their children, leading to the ICWA in the United States and to national investigations, landmark apologies, and redress in Australia and Canada.
David Carr, former New York Times critic and media columnist, died on Thursday. He was 58. In honor of Carr, we are re-posting our Audio Book Club about his 2008 memoir, The Night of the Gun.
The story of Carr's descent into alcoholism and drug dependency is, on the one hand, a typical addiction-and-recovery memoir. But Carr tries to add a new twist to the old genre by relying on his reporting skills, rather than just his memory, to reconstruct a more accurate personal history. Carr interviews his friends, family, and ex-girlfriends, and digs through his old medical records in search of objective truth. Does Carr succeed at leaving convention behind? The 45-minute conversation explores this question and many others.
Listen to more installments of Slate’s Audio Book Club.
With the release of the Fifty Shades of Grey movie in theaters this week, wandering minds are drifting back towards the world of E.L. James’ blockbuster erotic novel. In this episode of the Audio Book Club, previously published around the height of Fifty Shades mania, Slate culture editor Dan Kois, Slate culture critic Meghan O’Rourke, and Slate DoubleX founder Hanna Rosin debate the merits of the book.
O’Rourke describes it as maybe the worst book she’s read in her life, but still has quite a bit to say about the book’s issues of class. Rosin expanded on her ideas from her March 2012 piece about the book’s sexual politics and admitted that a second read had led her to better understand why every woman she knew was reading and loving the book. Kois attempted to perform Christian Grey’s “gray gaze” on the radio. Hear their two-year-old predictions of what the film, now in theaters, might look like.
Note: This episode contains spoilers.
Slate critics Dan Kois, Meghan O'Rourke, and Hanna Rosin discuss Phil Klay's National Book Award-winning debut collection of stories about the Iraq war.
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This month World Book Club talks to cult American-Canadian writer William Gibson about his much garlanded novel that launched the cyberpunk generation with one of the last century’s most potent visions of the cyberspace future.
The first winner of the science fiction ‘triple crown’ of awards for the genre, Neuromancer conjures a nightmare world of concrete megacities trapped under geodesic domes and run by shadowy megacorps. Washed-up computer hacker Case longs to escape by jacking into the technicolour but terrifying virtual reality of the Matrix, and is glad to be hired by a mysterious employer and his alluring sidekick Molly to pull off the ultimate hack.
This month World Book Club talks to bestselling German writer Daniel Kehlmann whose entertaining, and internationally acclaimed novel Measuring the World took the literary world by storm nine years ago.
In it he reimagines the lives of German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and German geographer Alexander von Humboldt and their many groundbreaking ways measuring the world.
Vividly bringing both very different geniuses to life Kehlmann captures their balancing acts between loneliness and love, absurdity and greatness, failure and success.
