Tag: Staff Blog (Page 1 of 20)

The Border Between: ‘American Dirt’ by Jeanine Cummins (with new material in review)

This review was originally posted on Tuesday, January 21, 2020. The introduction was added on Thursday, January 30.

Advance copies of American Dirt arrived at the store from Flatiron Books with a lot of fanfare, as do many books. I first heard about American Dirt from another reader at our store whose taste I tremendously respect, from whom I had first learned about Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (another story about a culture very different from mine, and one of my favorite books of all time, albeit written by a writer with first hand cultural experience with parts of the story she was telling). I read American Dirt myself, and was genuinely moved by what I thought was a compelling human story written with what I still believe were good intentions. However, prominent members of the Latinx literary community have disagreed, arguing that celebrating such an inauthentic depiction of their culture would be a disservice to the real experiences of Mexicans and migrants (Rebuttal view points will be linked below the review). Reasonable people can debate what the exact guidelines should be for writing about other cultures, especially ones socially and economically marginalized by those in power, but one of the chief pleasures of reading fiction I have found is to expand experiences beyond what I can live myself. If we who are not Latinx wish to experience that culture, it feels appropriate to listen to Latinx voices, from authors to beta readers to critics, at whatever stage of the process we hear them.

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins is, with all due respect to its competition, probably the best book of any kind that I’ve read in almost two years. It is a novel whose narrative and emotional power comes from being stretched taut between dual forces: senseless terror and redemptive generosity, life and death, dreams and nightmares, home and hope. I would recommend this book to anybody who reads for the same basic reason as I do: to have your soul made more expansive by the experience.

Lydia Pérez is a normal woman with a middle-class life in Acapulco, Mexico, when that life is destroyed violently and instantly at her niece’s quinceañera as her entire family–except for her eight year-old son, Luca–is murdered because of her husband Sebastián’s reporting on the leader of a local cartel. If anything could even be added on to this horror, Lydia knows this cartel leader, known to her as Javier Crespo Fuentes, one of her most cherished, thoughtful customers at her bookstore.

Questions of complicity haunt Lydia in her spare moments. But she doesn’t have time for guilt; she doesn’t have time for grief. Her number one priority is to keep her son safe by leaving Acapulco, the state of Guerrero, and all of Mexico. Only in America, el norte, does Javier’s reach not extend. Both Lydia–and her gifted son, forced to act beyond his years–are plenty smart, but also not prepared, because who could bear to be prepared for this? Marked for death, with nobody in their family left to turn to, Lydia and Luca are forced to press every advantage, rely on their wits, and learn which strangers to trust, and, even more importantly, who not to.

Lydia and Luca form a family unit, of sorts, with fellow migrants Soledad and Rebeca, who are sisters from the mountains of Honduras escaping trauma and danger of their own. Lorenzo, a former sicaro from the very cartel Lydia and Luca are fleeing from, flits in and out of their journey, casting a shadow of doubt and fear on the hopes of escape.

Don Winslow, the author of cartel crime books like The Power of the Dog calls it “a Grapes of Wrath for our times,” and I think the Steinbeck comparison is apt. You could call American Dirt an issue book, in the way it humanizes the headlines, and shows who migrants are and what they face, but it definitely stands on its own two feet as a gripping story all on its own.

The balancing act of Cummins’ novel manages is to be tense and terrifying without seeming exploitative. The story shows the cruelty of a broken world without reveling in it. It shows not the machinations of power, from the perspective of the cartels or the politicians, but the consequences of it. It shows migrants as individual humans, each with different stories, even if there are all centered in tragedy. Each of those stories is worth telling, and each one, worth hearing.

Lemuria has chosen American Dirt as its January 2020 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

Reading for further consideration:

History, mystery, and the open road in Nic Stone’s ‘Clean Getaway’

by Andrew Hedglin

William “Scoob” Lamar, the protagonist of Nic Stone’s fantastic new middle grade adventure, Clean Getaway, has a lot of questions at the beginning of the book. He just doesn’t know it yet.

When his grandmother, his beloved “G’ma,” shows up in an RV at the beginning of his spring break, to jailbreak him from being grounded, he jumps at the chance. He writes a note to his dad, and leaves his phone at home so he can’t be called. Just the wide open road, and the person he adores and trusts most in the world.

It’s not until they leave Atlanta and cross into Alabama that things start to get a little…weird. Why has G’ma sold her house to buy this RV? Did she really just dine-and-dash? Are they really headed all the way to Mexico? And does Scoob’s dad even know where they are?

He’s not getting answers to these questions immediately, but he is learning a lot, that’s for sure. It turns out his G’ma, a white lady, and his G’pop, a black man who he never met and died in prison, tried to take this very road trip all the way back in the 1960s. Of course, they had some help from Green Book, the famous guide for black travelers in the dangerous days of segregation and Jim Crow. As an African-American himself (with a serious, conscientious father), Scoob already knows some things about his history–he’s read To Kill a Mockingbird, and visits MLK’s home and church every January)–but some of what he learns really opens his eyes to how things were (and what still is).

Nic Stone has written an outrageously fun adventure with real tension and emotion mixed in. What really stands as a highlight in how well Stone understand how kids and adults relate to each other, even (and especially) they care a lot about each other. G’ma is completely over-the-top, fun, emotional, and increasingly mysterious, torn between unburdening secrets and teaching and protecting Scoob. Scoob himself is smart and and has a certain down-to-earth cool (he has a girlfriend, Shenice, back home in Atlanta), but can sometimes be a little impulsive and mistake-prone, as well as vulnerable in his powerlessness to the whims of adults, as all kids sometimes feel.

I think this book has a wide audience because while its colorful text (along with evocative illustrations by Dawud Anyabwile) and well-plotted structure are easy enough for kids on the earlier end of middle grade to digest, its keen emotional intelligence and relatable themes keep it interesting for kids on the older end of the middle grade age range. I found it pretty enjoyable as an adult, to tell the truth. As a bonus, this road trip novel even winds its way through Jackson, Mississippi (to pay respects to the great Medgar Evers). Whoever chooses to pick up this great middle school tale, they should know that they’re in for a wild ride!

Nic Stone will be at Lemuria on Friday, January 10, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss Clean Getaway, in conversation with Angie Thomas (author of The Hate U Give). Lemuria has selected Clean Getaway as a January 2020 selection for its Oz Books First Editions Club.

Your Moment of Zen: Frank LaRue Owen’s ‘The Temple of Warm Harmony’

“Afoot and light hearted, I take to the open road.” So begins Whitman’s long poem “Song of the Open Road,” a delightful, meandering meditation on what it means to be human. A theme that Whitman hammers into this poem, without a hint of subtlety, is the familiar “the journey is the destination,” a trope that has had countless iterations over time. Frank LaRue Owen’s new book, The Temple of Warm Harmony, follows in the same vein as Whitman, Homer, and Kerouac, yet he finds inspiration in the Eastern traditions of Zen and Pure Land Buddhism. It’s hard to classify which genre to place Temple: it could be shelved with poetry or with metaphysical studies or Zen meditation. But tacking The Temple of Warm Harmony down into a tidy category is antithetical to the book’s very purpose. Rather than telling us to be something, Owen’s poems invite us to simply be, whatever and wherever we are.

The book is arranged like a classical comedy. Poems at the beginning of the book show the speaker’s struggle with strife, loneliness, and feeling spiritually lost, having lost the tao, or the path, upon which he wishes to tread. In the end, though, we gain hope. “Sometimes the inner and outer/ move along like birds/ gliding in different directions,” Owen tells us in “Teaching of the Seasons.” Even though these “birds” of body and soul are moving in opposite directions, there is a peace to this split. They are “gliding,” unobstructed, to their various ends. Sometimes—often —the physical and spiritual are at opposing ends to each other, yet Owen doesn’t require that our currents be parallel for us to find contentment.

There are times when a reader’s defensiveness might make one look at Owen’s high-minded contentment as arrogance, but nothing could be farther from the truth. “Who is this guy, and why does he claim to have it all figured out,” one might ask. Well, he doesn’t know it all, and this is the source of the book’s wisdom. Part metaphysical self-help guide, part image-driven poetry, part Zen meditative koan collection, The Temple of Warm Harmony offers quiet in a time we desperately need it. When the barrage of news and tweets and noise (literal and otherwise) send us into an overwhelmed, bloated fatigue, Frank LaRue Owen offers us simplicity.

Frank LaRue Owen will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, November 20, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss The Temple of Warm Harmony. He will also be at Lemuria on Saturday, December 21, at 2:00 p.m. in a joint event with Beth Kander, author of Born in Syn.

Once in a ‘Blue Moon’: Who Jack Reacher Is, and Why You Should Care

He stands at 6’5” with muscles and a face that seem to attract women wherever he goes. He hops Greyhound buses around the U.S. and never stays in one town longer than necessary. He carries nothing on his person but a toothbrush, and in later years, a bank card. He’s a blues enthusiast and a coffee addict. He’s a former military policeman, he can shoot, he can brawl, he can run, and he can persuade and intimidate his enemies. There seems to be very little Jack Reacher cannot do, and with 24 novels, more than a dozen short stories, and two films starring Tom Cruise to his name, he’s still going strong.

Jack Reacher was the first series I picked up after graduating a little over two years ago, on the suggestion of my father. After having read nothing but assigned nonfiction and literary classics throughout the entirety of my college career, it was absolutely refreshing to read Lee Child’s thrillers for the first time. Child admits he doesn’t aim to write with overly elaborate wordplay or any kind of deep imagery common to the literary world, which is what I was accustomed to; alternately, he writes direct, straightforward, plot and character-driven thrillers. This is not to say the Child’s mysteries are easily solved, or that the characters are dry or predictable, but that the books are meant to be enjoyed without the need for any over-analyzing. I’d forgotten the sheer joy of reading a book for fun, and I found myself legitimately excited to find out what would happen in each entry in the series I read.

Jack Reacher is enigmatic in his demeanor yet surprisingly straightforward in his motivations: when Reacher acts, it’s because someone has wronged him, a close friend, or even a total stranger, and Reacher seeks revenge on their behalf. And no matter what town he arrives in, there is always a wrong to be righted. In the first novel, Killing Floor, he’s falsely accused of murder in small-town Georgia and aims to not only clear his name, but to track down the real culprit and shut down the nefarious operation calling the shots behind the scenes. In Persuader, he’s asked to rescue a trapped DEA agent and subsequently breaks into a crime lord’s mansion in rural Maine, encountering some unfinished business from his own military past. In Midnight Line, he spies a ring in a pawn shop in Wisconsin belonging to a West Point graduate, and his attempt to track down its owner leads him to an opioid enterprise that is destroying lives. There’s always an adventure that Reacher just happens upon no matter where he gets off the Greyhound, almost as if the rising point of the action was waiting for him to arrive. Reacher always delivers a response to the situation that doesn’t necessarily make him the most morally high-ground man out there, but a hero nonetheless.

Reacher’s most recent appearance is in the upcoming Blue Moon, released today, October 29th. He chooses to disembark the Greyhound as he sees an elderly man with a large envelope of cash being followed by a greedy-looking gentleman, and he thwarts the potential mugger. Reacher escorts the elderly man, Aaron Shevick, home where he learns Mr. Shevick and his wife are in debt to a loan shark belonging to the local Ukrainian gang. When Reacher offers to meet with the loan shark, he impersonates Aaron Shevick and gets subsequently caught up in a gang war between the Ukrainians and the rival Albanians. He helps the Shevicks come up with the money they need to pay their uninsured daughters’ medical expenses, seeks to help a waitress who captures Reacher’s eye get even with her own personal enemy, and assists various other people with their related goals throughout the book.

We have a typical setup for a Reacher novel: a small hook that causes Reacher to stop in town (Aaron Shevick’s mugging), a motivation for him to stay in town (his involvement with the Ukrainian gang), and a current news topic that relates Reacher’s fictional U.S.A. to our own (rising costs of healthcare, fake news, and others that I’d hate to spoil for you).

What sets Blue Moon apart from the other Reacher novels is a slight change in the way Reacher usually handles situations. His M.O. is usually to intimidate the target as best as he can first using his appearance and wordplay, with violence coming as a second option, but Blue Moon is packed with action scenes that show Reacher relying on his physical capabilities before using diplomacy. Given the brutality shown by the members of each rival gang, it seems as if Reacher is simply matching the violence they demonstrate toward each other; if you plan to read this entry in the series, prepare yourself for quite a bit of gunfire.

Why should you read Jack Reacher? Reacher’s sparked a love for reading fiction in me again that I’d long forgotten. He’s a fascinating man who seems to perform superhuman yet realistic feats at times when it seems like there’s no other way out. If you have an appreciation for mysteries and thrillers like I do, Jack Reacher is a series you absolutely cannot pass up. Check out Blue Moon today if you’re interested, and if you can’t wait until then to get started, come by Lemuria and ask for me. I’ll be happy to chat with you all day long about my unexpected favorite thriller series.

Signed first editions of Blue Moon: A Jack Reacher Novel are available in our online store. 

Going for Gold: ‘Medallion Status’ by John Hodgman

by Andrew Hedglin

Since so much of John Hodgman’s new memoir, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms, is concerned about his dwindling fame, I had to ask myself: how did I come to consider him famous in the first place? I’m in my thirties, so I remember those “Mac vs. PC” commercials and his appearances on the Daily Show. Mostly I just wondered to myself “…he isn’t famous anymore?” I guess I’m thinking of fame in author standards, which is probably a lower bar than for people on television.

Hodgman just released the excellent Vacationland two years ago, which I enjoyed tremendously (as did Aimee). I think I might have liked Medallion Status even better, however. Although the stories meander pleasantly in various directions, the main theme of the power is… Status. Privilege. Fame. Or at least the flirtation with it.

Hodgman writes about the titular exclusive airline perks,  Hollywood castle hotels, secret cabals, television sets, and at least two encounters with Paul Rudd. It’s all very glamorous, or seems to be so, anyway. It’s supposed to. But even as Hodgman is invited into this rarefied air, he is always humbled by insecurities and indignities, whether understandable (as when he is criticized by his director for his sub-par acting abilities) or absurd (being upstaged by a pair of Instagram-famous corgis at a party). The biggest indignity of all, however, is the transience of fame.

Worry not for John Hodgman, however. He has a pretty good fall-back in this book-writing thing. Other fantastic chapters that stand out to me are ones in which he describes all the jobs he has had, his fascination with extinct hockey teams, a Florida road trip with excursions to Mar-a-Lago and the Scientology headquarters, and one more small town story from Maine, if you really missed that from Vacationland.

Everybody needs a laugh now and then, and John Hodgman provides some of the best I’ve encountered in the literary world in some time, in between moving bouts of moving self-reflection. Which isn’t always as in demand, but it definitely should be. If you need either of those things in your life, or are just curious for a sneak peak in the margins of the high life, pick up a copy of Medallion Status today and join an elite set of sophisticated readers.

Get to Know Kaylee

How long have you worked at Lemuria?

About 2 months now!

What do you do at Lemuria? 

I currently work the front desk, helping people find the books that they’re looking for and recommending books they didn’t know they needed!

Talk to us what you’re reading right now.

I’m reading Wanderers by Chuck Wendig at the recommendation of every single other Lemurian, and Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie. I’m also reading an ARC of Here For It by R. Eric Thomas (comes out Feb 2020!!!) and really enjoying it.

What’s currently on your bedside table (book purgatory)?

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen and It by Stephen King. I’ll finish them one day!

How many books do you usually read at a time?

2 or 3.

I know it’s difficult, but give us your current top five books.

I’m really bad at picking favorites but I’ll try my best.

  1. Watership Down by Richard Adams
  2. A Reunion of Ghosts by Judith Claire Mitchell
  3. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
  4. The Humans by Matt Haig
  5. Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

Honorable mention goes to A Cosmology of Monsters by Shaun Hamill because I couldn’t leave it out.

Favorite authors?

In addition the the ones I already mentioned, Sylvia Plath, Emma Hooper, Warsan Shire, Stevie Smith, Agatha Christie, George Orwell,  and Shirley Jackson!

Any particular genre that you’re especially in love with?

I read a lot of literary fiction, but lately I’ve been really into horror and cozy mysteries lately.

What did you do before you worked at Lemuria?

I was a front of house shift leader at a bakery.

If you could share lasagna with any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you ask them?

I would share a nice veggie lasagna with Agatha Christie. I just wanna know how she comes up with those twists!

Why do you like working at Lemuria?

Obviously, I love talking to people about books. I also love shelving and keeping things organized. When I was a teenager, I would reorganize my bookshelf like once a week, so I think I was made for this job!

If Lemuria could have ANY pet (mythical or real), what do you think it should be?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, we NEED a shop cat!!

If you had the ability to teleport, where would you go first?

I’ve always wanted to go to Amsterdam, it’s such a cool city!

Get to Know Susannah

How long have you worked at Lemuria?

Two months.

What do you do at Lemuria?

I work at the front desk, helping customers find the books they need, answering phone calls, and keeping track of inventory. My favorite part is setting out book displays.

Talk to us what you’re reading right now.

I’m reading John Grisham’s Theodore Boone middle grade series.

What’s currently on your bedside table (book purgatory)?

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Jamison.

How many books do you usually read at a time?

Just one, if I can help it.

I know it’s difficult, but give us your current top five books.

  • Agatha Christie – The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
  • Lee Child – The Midnight Line, a Jack Reacher novel
  • Chuck Palahniuk – Fight Club
  • J.K. Rowling – Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
  • Eoin Colfer – Artemis Fowl

Favorite authors?

Agatha Christie and Lee Child are my current favorites, but growing up Roald Dahl was my absolute favorite.

Any particular genre that you’re especially in love with?

I’m particularly fond of thrillers as of late.

What did you do before you worked at Lemuria?

I worked at Copiah-Lincoln Community College in Natchez as a library assistant.

If you could share lasagna with any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you ask them?

I’d love to meet Homer, possibly solve the historical mystery of who he really is.

Why do you like working at Lemuria?

I like books.

If Lemuria could have ANY pet (mythical or real), what do you think it should be?

I think a flying monkey would be useful to help us put away the books on the tall shelves.

If you had the ability to teleport, where would you go first?

Japan. My bucket list includes visiting some Shinto shrines.

Familial Fright: ‘A Cosmology of Monsters’ by Shaun Hamill

A Cosmology of Monsters, the debut from Shaun Hamill, has a story so richly compelling on an emotional level and so full of creeping dread that it is more meant to be read, than to be read about. Because of this, I will do my best to refrain from revealing too many details from the plot of the book.

Instead, I will say this: Cosmology opens with two quotes. The first is a quote from Ray Bradbury about the legendary actor Lon Chaney, known for playing The Wolf Man. The second is an excerpt from The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft. These quotes are masterfully chosen, simply because they perfectly set the tone of the novel.

The latter quote exemplifies the “fear of the unknown” that made Lovecraft, though a deeply problematic figure in literature, the powerhouse of horror that influenced nearly every writer in the genre to this day. It is the the eerie feeling of not fully understanding what is happening; the helplessness of an observer. Hamill executes this masterfully.

The first quote, however, is far more meaningful. It describes the effect that Lon Chaney had on audiences, not as a monster, but as a man tapping into the monster we fear is within each of us. It puts forward the notion that Lovecraft may have been wrong, that the greatest fear isn’t of the unknown, but rather a fear of oneself. Hamill certainly weaves a tale of Eldritch Horror that fits right in with the tales of Lovecraft, but where the book shines is not with the monsters, but with the people.

The central story of the novel revolves around two generations of the Turner family, and their creation: a scary Halloween attraction that comes to be known as The Wandering Dark. The protagonist, the youngest son of the family, narrates the tale as a chronicle of his history, and the story very much unfolds this way. Yes, there is horror. Yes, there are monsters, but at the heart of all of this is a compelling work of fiction about grief, mental illness, love, hardships, and family. Hamill’s shining achievement is not in creating a new mythos of dread, though he has certainly done that, it is in crafting a new piece of Eldritch Horror that is quite approachable and universal. I’m confident that anyone could read A Cosmology of Monsters and relate to it on some level, and that is truly rare for a book in this genre.

I loved this book. Anyone who has spoken to me knows this. It’s my favorite book of 2019 and possibly of the last few years. If you want to read something truly unique and special, and maybe even get a few scares too, come get a copy.

Shaun Hamill will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, September 18, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss A Cosmology of Monsters.

Dog Blog: The ‘Dog Man’ series by Dav Pilkey

So, I’m a bit particular about what I read. I favor prose and description over plot, character over conflict. John Milton’s Paradise Lost is the greatest achievement of English writing. No American writer will ever top the beauty of Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing. Thrilling page-turners aren’t my thing—give me poetry. And with all this literary snobbery in mind, let me thoroughly and unabashedly heap praise on the Dog Man series by Dav Pilkey.

First, a little in-universe context. Dog Man is a book-within-a-book series, “written” by George and Harold, the mischievous heroes of Pilkey’s zany Captain Underpants series. Dog Man was the duo’s first foray into comic making, and we’re better people for it. The titular character has, like all super heroes, an interesting origin story: the city’s best cop and best police dog are injured in an explosion. The dog’s body is badly injured, but his head is intact; his human partner’s injuries are the exact opposite. A nurse suggests a reasonable way to save both—sew the dog’s head on the man’s body. Thus, Dog Man, crime fighter extraordinaire.

My reasons for liking this series are myriad. The writing and artwork progresses as George and Harold “age.” The artwork improves from book to book, and the jokes really gain sophistication as the series moves along. George and Harold’s 5th grade teacher introduces them to classic literature (Call of the Wild, East of Eden, etc) and the two roll this newfound elegance into their own writing. The book puns in the Dog Man titles are amazing: A Tale of Two Kitties, Brawl of the Wild, and (launching at this year’s book festival!) For Whom the Ball Rolls. But there’s also a nice dose of gross boy humor. You can imagine the jokes around the word duty.

I asked an expert to weigh in on this. According to my 9-year-old son, Dog Man “is hilarious, silly, and fun. Dav Pilkey is one of my favorite writers and Dog Man is my favorite of his characters because he’s just so funny and goofy. I can’t get enough!” And I agree with James wholeheartedly. The series is clever but not cloying, valuable without being overly didactic. We learn lessons about humanity, family, belonging, and love. “The mind is it’s own place,” says John Milton, “and can make a hell of heaven, a heaven of hell.”  And, there are poop jokes. Everyone wins.

Dog Man art by James

Dav Pilkey will be launching his “Do Good” tour at the Mississippi Book Festival on Saturday, August 17. He will be speaking at 9:30 a.m. in the Galloway Sanctuary.

Adding up ‘The Cost of These Dreams’ by Wright Thompson

by Andrew Hedglin

I have always lived in Jackson (or its suburbs), but for a couple of years in my mid-twenties, I lived and taught in an extremely rural area of the Louisiana delta. For a long time, I had trouble finding anybody my age to hang out with, and I reached desperately for things to connect me to the outside world that I had come from. I got really into podcasts for my long commutes (especially old episodes of This American Life). Every trip to Vicksburg seemed like a visit to a vast metropolis. And on Friday nights, I would head over to my town’s one small chain pizza joint, and I would read my copy of ESPN the Magazine.

Mostly, I’m a football fan, with only a minor concern for keeping a toe in other waters of the sporting well, mostly for conversation purposes. And occasionally, the content would run a little too deep into the numbers and statistics for me to connect. But often, astonishingly so, it was a repository of top-flight long-form journalism, stories that connect you straight to the truths of the human heart (Faulkner’s “old verities,” if you will). And Mississippi’s own Wright Thompson is a master of this form, evident in his new collection of his ESPN the Magazine stories, entitled The Cost of These Dreams.

I had let my magazine habit lapse some time after I got back to the Jackson area (although, to be fair, within a year, I was working at a bookstore). I guess I’m not the only one, because ESPN the Magazine will no longer distribute print issues after September. But every once in a while, it’s refreshing to go back and revisit the gorgeous prose put together for these magazines, no less worthy for being ephemeral, like an ice sculpture or a rose garden. I say that, but although some of these stories have a decade-old byline, they all feel remarkable fresh and relevant. If the form is temporary, the stories themselves have at least a little bit of timelessness to them.

Thompson tackles the travails of some of the biggest stars to ever play, like Michael Jordan, Lionel Messi, Ted Williams, and Tiger Woods. But he is equally at home with ordinary citizens in New Orleans and Chicago. But people who have been to the pinnacle is obviously a fascination with him. This is the “dreams” part of his work.

But the theme that shows up again and again in this stories is devastation, either of the psyche, but sometimes of an entire physical place. This is the “cost” portion of Thompson’s work. What is so remarkable is how these ideas work hand-in-hand with each other, again and again in so many people and places.

It’s hard to pick a favorite, because I enjoyed them all immensely, but if my arm was twisted, I would have to say “Beyond the Breach,” a ten-year anniversary piece of New Orleans after Katrina that spans 70 pages of the book and once dominated an entire issue. My favorite part is when Thompson writes about Blair Boutte, a local business and community leader who grew up in the Iberville housing projects, who helped his friend Shack Brown run a community football league that helped local kids stay off the streets and, possibly, save their lives. The city’s parks department seizes the playground where the league is located to make a public green space that makes the city feel “safer” for people who make its hospitality economy run. And then Thompson writes the kicker: “For Blair, two contradictory ideas are true a the same time; there aren’t good guys and bad guys, but there are certainly winners and losers.”

It’s that sort of nuance, the mixing of the good and the bad, that we need to remember as live our lives and plan our cities, a reminder to be careful, to stop, to consider. We can reach for a better tomorrow, but what will it cost? If the cost is too high, is it really better, worthwhile?

So, yeah, every story in this collection is contractually obligated to connect to sports in some way. But sports are powerful symbols in society, and you don’t have to care about the fine-print box scores to feel the humanity and power in stories like these. If you feel the urge to connect to the larger world out there, you could do worse than reading The Cost of the These Dreams.

Wright Thompson will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival August 17 as a participant in the “For the Love of the Game” sports panel at 10:45 a.m. at the Galloway Foundery.

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