MOST INTERESTING ESSAYS 12/4/25: THEORY & TRUTH, MEMORY & INTELLIGENCE, PSYCHIATRY, WRITING, EGYPT IN 2019, LIVE OR DIE, GARDEN OF EDEN, SOCIAL DYSFUNCTION, DEATH ROW, RIGHT & WRONG, FRANTZ FANON, TRUTHINESS, CONSPIRACY, LIBERALITY, LIFE IS LIQUID, BECOMING god-LIKE, TIPPING POINT, VANISHING WORLD
Paulette Giles offers a story of America’s unique racial, ethnic, religious and experiential culture.
Books of Interest Website: chetyarbrough.blog
News of the World (A Novel)
By: Paulette Jiles
Narrated By: Grover Gardner
Paulette Jiles (Author, poet, finalist for the National Book Award for “News of the World”)
“News of the World” is a story of a young German American girl abducted by Indians in the 1860s, near San Antonio, Texas. She is recovered by a 71-year-old veteran of the Civil War. The author’s contextual research is impressive. Having personally lived in Texas for several years and knowing there is a small Texas town north of San Antonio with a large German ancestral population,”News of the World” becomes immediately credible.
Jiles fictional story is about a young white girl who is 10 years old when she is recovered from an Indian tribe by a Civil War veteran.
The young girl was abducted when she was six. Her four years of captivity were in the formative years of life. She successfully adapts to her tribal environment but does not completely lose knowledge of her younger past. Jiles hero is a Texas oldster who travels the country making a living as a reader of newspapers to citizens interested in news of the world. Many American citizens did not have the money, or the education, to read news of the world. To have that news read to them became an entertainment for many willing to pay a penny, a dime, or as much as a quarter. The former veteran, as an officer in the Rebel army during the war is well educated with experience of combat during the Civil War. That combat experience becomes important in the return of the captive to her German immigrant family.
A bounty of $50 is offered for return of the abducted girl.
The veteran takes the job. Jiles writing is excellent, but the narration of Grover Gardner gives the story an extra level of interest. Experience of life is a trial by fire for most human beings. Imagine being abducted from your family at the age of six by a culture different than your own and how traumatic it would be but how life expanding it could become. This six-year-old represents the melting pot of America. Jiles creates a fictional representative of three cultures, i.e. German, Indian, and pioneer that influences the melding of American culture.
Though Giles may not have meant to illustrate the melding of cultures by her entertaining story, much of what American culture represents is an amalgam of older cultures.
America’s Civil War, the Indian wars, and living life makes American culture unique. Every nation is made up of different races, ethnicities, religions, and experiences that make them unique. Paulette Giles offers a story of America’s unique racial, ethnic, religious and experiential culture.
The eradication of inequality is in the eyes of beholders. We are mere humans struggling to be better than we are.
Books of Interest Website: chetyarbrough.blog
The Female Persuasion (A Novel)
By: Meg Wolitzer
Narrated By: Rebecca Lowman
Meg Wolitzer (Author)
Many “sexual awakening” books of the past are about men and boys. Nabokov’s Lolita, Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Baldwins “Giovanni’s Room” to name three. “The Female Persuasion” gives listener/readers a glimpse of what “sexual awakening” is for girls. That is not to say “The Female Persuasion” is only about sexual awakening. Wolitzer’s story illustrates there is little difference between young men’s and women’s interest in sex and their ambition for success in an adult world.
“The Female Persuasion” gives voice to the equality of women despite historical misogyny.
Two women roommates at a fictional college talk about their lives and explain their frustration with unequal treatment in society. One has sexual relations with women, the other with men but each feel their opportunities in life are limited by being women in a Mans’ world. Greer Kadetsky complains to the University about a male student who sexually assaults her and is ignored by the administration. She is characterized as an intelligent woman who is eligible for admission to Yale but is rejected because of her parents’ mistakes on a financial disclosure form about scholarship assistance. Her unhappiness about not getting into Yale is compounded by the student assault she reports that is essentially ignored by the local college she attends.
Men and women are equal and should be afforded all the rights and opportunities available to men.
The heroine of the story has a boyfriend, Cory Pinto, whom she met in high school. They became lovers at some point in their relationship. She notes in a college dorm where her boyfriend undresses her and expresses admiration of her body. She appreciates her lover’s comment. The author’s perception of beauty reinforces the similarity between men and women and their sexuality. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, whether male or female, but every person appreciates positive comment about their appearance.
Another element of interest in “The Female Persuasion” is a reinforcement of the saying “Birds of a feather flock together”. Cory and Greer come from lower middleclass families while showing higher than average intelligence in high school that leads them to a college education. After graduation, Cory and Greer move-in together with Cory finding a job while Greer volunteers at a non-profit while pursuing a writing career. Is it a surprise that a person with a college degree has a hard time finding a job after graduating? No, but it seems men are luckier, or one might conclude men are beneficiaries of a built-in gender bias.
Not to read too much into Wolitzer’s story, it seems most job opportunities are better for men than women.
Greer has a chance meeting with a feminist who speaks at the university she attends. In that serendipitous contact, Greer makes a positive impression on the speaker. After graduation, Greer is contacted by the famous feminist with a possible job interview. However, the potential employer dies, and the interview never happens. Meanwhile, Cory has found a job and is pursuing his career. Greer is living at home with her parents to cut down on expenses.
Greer is contacted by a New York feminist organization and is offered an interview that results in a job in New York.
Cory is working outside the country for his company, but the couple continues a long-range relationship. Greer is gaining some success and experience in her job. An interesting incident is noted that gives listener/readers insight to women’s competitiveness when Greer exhibits reluctance to show a letter to her employer for her former gay friend looking for a job. Greer chooses not to proffer the letter to her employer and lies to her friend about having given it. This seems a petty incident, but it is present in all human beings, i.e., the feeling that a person who has found their step on the ladder of success should care about others when they might be competing with them if they go to work for the same company. This seems a matter of personal ambition, not a gender or sexual orientation issue.
The end of the book offers an unsatisfying “bow tie”. The ending has a fairy tale quality that will appeal to some, but the real world is different. Life happens, jobs change, people’s relationships fall apart; some mend, others do not. The eradication of inequality is in the eyes of beholders. We are mere humans struggling to be better than we are.
Sexuality is the boon and bane of human society. The boon is human procreation. The bane is the shame visited upon human beings.
Books of Interest Website: chetyarbrough.blog
“The Mothers”
By: Brit Bennett
Narrated By: Adenrele Ojo
Brit Bennett (Author, New York Times Bestseller, graduate of Stanford University and University of Michigan.)
In one sense, “The Mothers” is about the serendipity of life. In another it is about human shaming. Brit Bennett’s book infers life’s happiness comes as much from chance as by effort. Of course, human life begins with “…Mothers” but as science explains, a part of who we are and who we become is from fathers. Bennett’s story is a view of life through the eyes of a daughter who loses her mother through suicide. The daughter’s genetic inheritance is intelligence and ambition. The daughter is born in a lower middleclass family. She lives through her high school years when her mother dies. She lives with her father and remembers her mother’s disappointment with life. Her mother’s wish for herself and daughter is to become more than what the circumstances of life seem to offer.
The main female characters of “The Mothers” are the daughter, Nadia Turner and her friend, Aubrey Evans.
The main male character is Luke Sheppard, a high school football athlete who is seriously injured in a sports accident. He is 21, living at home with his father who is a minister and his mother who manages the household and helps her husband with the ministry. Nadia is 17 and in high school. She is academically near the top of her class. Luke becomes Nadia’s boyfriend. Nadia becomes pregnant. Aubrey Evans becomes a close friend sometime after Nadia’s abortion. It is Nadia’s decision to have the abortion. Luke is ambivalent about Nadia’s decision but, with the help of Luke’s mother, $600 is given to Nadia for the abortion.
Luke leaves the decision to Nadia on the abortion but limits his involvement to giving her the required $600 fee.
Luke regrets his behavior as the father of an unborn child and his absence during and after the abortion. Nadia goes on to college at the University of Michigan after having become friends with Aubrey in high school. Nadia and Aubrey become close friends. While Nadia is going to college and seeing the world, Luke and Aubrey meet and become a couple. They eventually marry. Nadia never tells Aubrey of her relationship with Luke or the abortion.
Once listeners become acquainted with the three main characters, human shaming takes over the story.
Every major and minor character shames themselves and others by their acts or ignorance. Both mothers and fathers are guilty, but the author infers mothers are the most shaming. Mothers shame children rather than try to understand and guide their human nature.
Human sexuality dominates lives whether male or female, young, middle aged, or old.
The story is well written, but its theme misses the mark. Mothers and fathers (all humans) are equally blame-worthy when it comes to shaming. Sexuality is the boon and bane of human society. The boon is human procreation. The bane is the shame visited upon human beings. Bennett’s characters show there is plenty of shame to go around. Shaming is popular which explains why Bennett’s book became a bestseller.
There are many ways of understanding Andrew Boryga’s book, “Victim”. It is an eye-opening examination of minority life in America.
Books of Interest Website: chetyarbrough.blog
“Victim”
By: Andrew Boryga
Narrated by: Anthony Rey Perez
Andrew Boryga (Author, Bronx resident, Cornell graduate, freelance writer for the NYT, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic.)
There are many ways of understanding Andrew Boryga’s book, “Victim”. It is an eye-opening examination of minority life in America. Being poor, whether a minority or a white American, is a struggle for identity. A white person in America has immense advantage, but Boryga’s story shows how much greater the challenge is for a person of color.
The main characters of Boryga’s story are Latinos named Javier Perez, Gio and Lena. Some may argue only Javier and Gio are the most relevant but Lena, Javier’s romantic partner, is at the heart of a question of who is right in lives of inequality.
There are many reasons to appreciate Boryga’s insightful story. It gives credit to committed teachers who struggle to raise the sights of students who are challenged by poverty and hardship. Javier is a character with ambition to be more than a street hustler trying to get by in a low-income neighborhood in the Bronx. It is with the help of a single mother and a dedicated teacher that Javier pursues a better life. His father was a drug dealer, murdered in Puerto Rico. Being raised in New York by his mother, Javier visits his father when he is murdered. That experience, the strict upbringing of his mother, and a teacher at his school offer lessons of life and opportunity to Javier. With the help of his teacher, Javier becomes a college-educated’ writer who struggles to become a literary and financial success.
It seems the window of opportunity for Javier depends on his intelligence, the help of his teacher, and retrospectively, his friend, Gio.
At first reading of “Victim”, Gio appears to offer an alternative life like that which Javier’s father followed. Obviously, what happened to Javier’s father influences Javier’s choices in life. Javier tries to influence Gio to abandon the drug-mule’ road he is following. Javier fails Gio, himself, Lena, and the Latino students he teaches in his neighborhood.
Javier meets Lena in college.
Lena is Latino but comes from a more financially secure family in the Bronx with a strict father and loving mother. In contrast, Javier is being raised by his widowed mother who is barely making enough money to keep a roof over their head and food on the table. Lena is a social activist for Latino rights. Javier and Lena become lovers but from quite different economic and family backgrounds. They move in together, but their place of cohabitation is the old neighborhood in which Javier is a teacher and struggling writer.
Lena pursues her activist career with little pay and a difficult adjustment in an unsafe neighborhood in the Bronx.
She grows to feel isolated and unfulfilled in her pursuit of equal rights, both as a Latino and woman. Javier understands the neighborhood in which they live but to Lena it is too dangerous, and her job does not offer enough personal satisfaction and income for her and Javier to improve their lives. Javier ignores her concern because he understands life in the neighborhood and feels comfortable in dealing with its risks.
Javier and Lena are at a crossroads in their lives. Javier decides their crossroad has a meaning that is worthy of a story that could be published in the paper for which he works part time while teaching at the local school.
His story disingenuously describes the conflict between Lena and himself. Javier believes and writes that he would be abandoning the fight for Latino rights by leaving his neighborhood for a safer community that Lena desires. Javier does not take into consideration their common goals or the difference between a woman and a man when living in a tough neighborhood. The story he writes about their relationship and its breakup makes him famous. He is offered a higher paying job as a full-time writer. He quits teaching but the break-up is irreversible. The reason for its irreversibility is substance of the story. His story distorts the truth of why Lena leaves Javier and the neighborhood.
While Javier strives for success as a writer, Gio is arrested for drug dealing and sentenced to prison. Javier loses touch with Gio because of their different life decisions.
Earlier, Javier tries to rescue his friend Gio from the gang life of the neighborhood. Ironically, Gio saves Javier from a false understanding of what happened in his life. The mistake Javier makes with Gio is similar to the mistake he makes with Lena. Gio’s and Lena’s lives are only their own. Javier fails to appreciate their personal experiences and how they made them who they became. Gio’s life is changed by his gang and later prison experience. Lena’s life is formed by the influence of her parents and life as a middleclass woman who wishes to help her race succeed in a prejudiced world. Javier sacrifices his relationship with both Gio and Lena by not understanding their personal identities and reasons for being who they become.
Javier makes the mistake of using Lena and Gio as subjects of his stories that do not represent who they are from their personal life experiences.
However, Javier’s stories are so well written that he becomes a coveted writer by his newspaper and a book agent who wishes to represent him. The problem is that his stories are made of facts that are not truthful representations of either Lena’s or Gio’s evolved lives.
Javier is publicly exposed for his distorted stories about what it is like, and what it means to be a Latino American in a white-biased culture.
Javier’s wish to become a renowned writer is halted by a you-tube interview by an investigative reporter. He is fired by the paper who employs him. Gio tells Javier to quit feeling sorry for himself and tells him to get on with his life. Gio has overcome the trials of his imprisonment and is on the way to becoming a positive contribution to society even though it continues to be biased against his success. Javier begins to understand the importance of factual accuracy and understanding of others when writing a story purported to be the truth. One wonders if that is why the author chooses to identify “Victim” as a novel and not a report of his or anyone else’s life.
The story of “Victim” is that inequality is a fact of life but not an insurmountable obstacle to peace and prosperity for determined individuals.
“The Beauty in Breaking” is about life as an eternal recurrence that offers some peace of mind in a world troubled by its inhumanity.
Books of Interest Website: chetyarbrough.blog
“The Beauty in Breaking” (A Memoir)
By: Michele Harper
Narrated by: Nicole Lewis
Michele Harper (Physician, Author, Public Speaker.)
Leaves fall from the tree to expose the bark and bite of life. Michele Harper’s memoir shakes the tree of American life. Relying on the veracity of Harper’s story, she is raised in a family with a physically abusive father who divorces her mother, an art dealer.
Harper notes her paternal father was physically abusive.
After Harper’s paternal father leaves Harper’s mother, Harper notes he offers some financial assistance to Harper in college. Harper explains she passes some of that assistance on to her mother while attending Harvard. Harper earns a BA in psychology. She goes on to acquire a medical degree from a New York university to become an emergency room physician.
Harper’s story touches on the complexity of life as a Black American. She marries a white man while at Harvard, but they divorce at his choice. The failure of their marriage is shown to be hard for Harper, but she is driven to succeed and moves on to educate herself in her chosen field of work.
Harper’s experience of childhood abuse, her personal marriage break-up, and work as a physician in three different emergency room positions, are lessons for life and living.
Her focus is on overcoming her trials to be good at her job even though much is beyond her control. The notion of not knowing what crises you will face in a medical emergency room, let alone a doctor’s experience as a Black American, offers a unique perspective to Harper’s memoir.
Abuse comes in many forms.
There is child abuse that occurs in many homes throughout the world. There is being a minority in a culture controlled by a majority that discriminates against those who are different. There is inequality of opportunity that creates an underclass that is trapped in an eternal cycle of poverty. Harper is denied promotion to Administrator in her first hospital job because she is a woman. Her supervisor notes a woman, let alone a Black woman, has never had the Administrator’ job in that hospital. Misogyny triumphs once again.
Harper chooses to leave the hospital that denied her the promotion.
As an administrator in another hospital Harper sees the consequence of poverty. Poverty seeps into nearly every culture in the world with its accompanying violence, compounded by weak to non-existent gun control laws in the United States. Harper writes about her encounter with a young boy who has his sneakers stolen by a bully at school.
Harper interviews the young Black grade school child who is thinking about getting his shoes back with a gun.
Harper calls a child services employee to explain her concern about the child’s access to a gun at his home. The child service’s person explains she sees this in many children’s homes where poverty is one lost job away from a family being on the street. This young boy’s parents both work to keep the family housed and fed. The social services person explains gun accessibility and violence are common in poor black neighborhoods. Where poverty is a fact of life, child services can only go so far to change what is toxic in a child’s environment. Gun availability is beyond the control of Harper or child service’s employees. The extent of Harper’s intervention is limited to raising the issue with the young boy’s parents–with the hope that they will act to be sure no gun becomes available.
Harper finds a third job as a VA hospital administrator. She interviews a female patient seeking psychological help. In the interview, Harper is told by the patient she had been raped by her supervising sergeant and another soldier in Afghanistan.
She became pregnant and decided to have an abortion. That experience continues to traumatize her life. She seeks help to overcome its affects. Harper becomes the patient’s lifeline for the counseling she needs to overcome her abuse.
There seems no “…Beauty in Breaking” as one nears the end of Harper’s memoir but one begins to realize the “Beauty…” is “…in Breaking” the cycle of abuse.
The cycle can be broken with exposure, rehabilitation, caring, and acting to remove the causes of abuse. Harper’s memoir shows how it is done. Breaking the cycle of abuse is a long, laborious process that begins with people focusing on incidents of abuse and acting to mitigate its causes and consequences. “The Beauty in Breaking” is Harper’s way of exposing abuse and illustrating what can be done about it.
Harper’s ultimate theory for the resolution of human abuse is belief in Lifes’ recurrence. Her theory is that every life is eternal. When one dies, they will be reborn into another life. Harper comes to grips with her life as it is and makes it better through meditation. Her belief about life as an eternal recurrence offers her peace of mind about the people she saves or loses in a hospital emergency room.
Rooney’s story is not a comforting tale but a reflection of social dysfunction that threatens humanity.
Books of Interest Website: chetyarbrough.blog
“Normal People” (A Novel)
By: Sally Rooney
Narrated by: Aoife McMahon
Sally Rooney (Irish author and screenwriter.)
Sally Rooney infers high school is a testing ground for one’s conduct and place in society. High school is a highly formative period because of its social influences. It is a testing ground for leaders and followers. However, students do not arrive as blank slates. Every person has a genetic inheritance and family relationships, some come from wealth, some from poverty, some from close families, others from broken homes with emotionally close or distant parents. Rooney reveals how high school students bring learned experiences that test one’s social and intellectual abilities. Rooney’s main characters, Marianne and Connell come from different socioeconomic backgrounds who become intimately close but socially isolated.
Mariane comes from a wealthy Irish family, Connell from a poor Irish single parent family. Both are gifted with high intelligence and low self-esteem. Mariane’s self-esteem is largely caused by her mother’s and sibling’s ridicule. Connell’s low self-esteem seems to come from poverty while being raised by a single supportive mother. Mariane and Connell become lovers in high school. It is Mariane’s first sexual experience and Connell’s first meaningful relationship.
That tragic event of a young friend’s suicide makes Mariane and Connell re-evaluate their lives. Despair over their non-committal lives reaches a crisis reflected in the statistics noted above.
Rooney explores Mariane’s and Connell’s on and off again romance through their college years and later adult lives. Their relationship remains close, but both choose other lovers in their post HS’ years. Mariane’s hook-ups are with self-absorbed, abusive men, while Connell’s appear casual, not deep or lasting. Near the end of the story Mariane and Connell are brought together by the tragic loss of a friend who commits suicide. A listener realizes they are both on a path that could either be self-destructive or redemptive.
In the last chapters, Rooney leaves listeners wondering whether Mariane and Connell will have a life together or revert to their former desperate lives.
REVIEWS AND VIEWS OF LIFE 