FALL SPOTLIGHT: AMBER RUFFIN & LACEY LAMAR

Amber Ruffin (left) & Lacey Lamar

Jason Nocito

In The World Record Book of Racist Stories (Grand Central Publishing, Nov. 22), sisters Amber Ruffin and Lacey Lamar follow up their 2021 debut, You’ll Never Guess What Happened to Lacey, with an outrageously funny collection of anecdotes about their everyday experiences with racism as well as stories from family members. Kirkus’ starred review deems it “required reading in today’s America.” Ruffin and Lamar answered our questions by email.

What did you find surprising about your creative process while writing as a duo? Ruffin: Since everything in the book actually happened, writing as a duo was easier than you think. We really weren’t “writing” as much as we were just remembering. Lamar: It was surprising how easy the writing process felt because of the number of stories we had to tell. We actually left some stories out.

Who is your ideal reader for The World Record Book of Racist Stories? Ruffin: Our ideal reader is the type of person who is comforted by hearing they aren’t the only one with two books full of racist stories. Also, it’s always great when people tell us that they read the book and changed their behavior. Then you feel like your silly stories made a difference. Lamar: My ideal reader would be the people who are going through the same things that are happening in the book. I’ve heard many times how [our story] has given people the courage to speak up for themselves, and I love that!

What book do you absolutely love that is not as well known as it deserves to be? Or, what book released in the past few years deserved more attention? Ruffin: Black Buck by Mateo Askaripour! Lamar: The Deep by Rivers Solomon [with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes]. A book about Black mermaids, need I say more?

If someone were going to write the story of your life, who would you want it to be, and why? Ruffin: If someone was going to write the story of my life, it would be me! I love me the most, and I think I would do me justice. Lamar: I would want it to be Quinta Brunson; we are both Black nerds!

Interview by Francesca Vultaggio

love affairs, struggles with alcohol and drugs, grief, and heartache in between. Through all the highs and lows, Price has remained loyal to her craft, refusing to compromise her artistry despite industry pressure to conform. Like many great artists, she is able to transform her most challenging experiences into art, and she grants readers deep insight into the stories behind some of her most powerful songs. This is a fast-paced tale in which music and love always take center stage. In Price’s world, her talent takes precedence over commercial success, and people are far more important than material possessions. “Looking back, there was a romanticism in knowing that we might be failures but we were talented failures in a business that championed mediocrity,” writes the author. “Even in the lonely shadows of the burning spotlight, beyond the endless roads to the sprawling cities and trash towns, between the empty gas tank and the underattended gigs, we were spreading the true gospel of meaningful music and the lost art of poetry and songs. We would not sell out.” A truly gifted musician, Price writes about her journey with refreshing candor.

Ronstadt, Linda & Lawrence Downes Photos by Bill Steen Heyday (248 pp.) $35.00 | Oct. 4, 2022 978-1-59714-579-4

The renowned musician digs deep for her roots—familial, cultural, musical, and culinary.

A native of Tucson, Arizona, with a family tree that extends to Germany by way of northern Mexico, Ronstadt celebrates the Sonoran Desert, which lies on both sides of the border. “It is amazing that a place so roasted by sunlight and heat can summon life in such variety and abundance,” she writes in collaboration with journalist Downes. That variety includes people as well as plants and animals; to live in such a challenging environment, she adds, people must learn to cooperate. Small wonder that Ronstadt detests the border wall, “a scar and an abomination.” Though she seldom rises to anger, the mood of anti-Hispanic racism that the previous occupant of the White House (never named in the text) stirred up moves her to righteous indignation: “It would be more honest if we called our country the United States of Who the Fuck Are You?” Ronstadt is more often inclined, though, to fond remembrances of her ancestral town of Banámichi, Sonora, and her Tucson hometown, with all the massive tortillas and lovely horses to be found there. Interwoven between stories of growing up in a musical, multicultural family are recipes that wouldn’t be out of place in a collection by Rick Bayless or Diana Kennedy (both cited and lauded): A foodie could do worse than her family formula for albondigas. Ronstadt finds connections between past and present in Sonoran cuisine, writing, for instance, “Carne seca is a vivid reminder of the way history in the borderlands remains close to the surface—the seventeenth century is still as near as any Food City grocery in Tucson or tienda in Sonora.” True enough, and lovers of Mexican food and desert places, to say nothing of fans of Ronstadt’s music, will find much to cherish here.

Ruffin, Amber & Lacey Lamar Grand Central Publishing (240 pp.) $29.00 | Nov. 22, 2022 978-1-5387-2455-2

A perfect follow-up to the authors’ You’ll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey. Ruffin and her sister, Lamar, describe their second collaboration as a collection of stories not just about the two of them, as in their previous book, but “about our whole family, all our siblings and even some friends.” Here, the tone is heavier than You’ll Never Believe; the authors note that the text is roughly “50/50 silly/scary racist stories.” Their tales range widely—someone using a ridiculous racist phrase at work that required research to understand; a jaw-dropping example of “why we need diversity training at diversity training”; and a heartbreaking yet poignant account of Lamar leading a Zoom-based Q&A session regarding the first book with several “boys and girls homes across the US”—and offer a pleasingly diverse array of different generations, occupations, and environments. As in the previous book, the banter between the sisters is consistently funny, but the underlying social commentary remains incisive. Among countless others, standout pieces include Lamar’s description of an incredibly awkward first date and a story about a Black mother who was informed that when her children registered at a new school, they would need their pictures taken and “show it to all the students so they don’t get scared.” Though obviously upset, the mother made the pictures because, as the authors write, “if these people need to see Black people in order to not feel scared, then there’s no telling what the fuck these little monsters are capable of.” Ultimately, Ruffin and Lamar provide a much-needed wake-up call for anyone who still doesn’t believe the severity of anti-Black racism in America. “What is a racist?” they ask at the beginning. “Is it just a confused person who means well but blah blah blah? No. A racist is a turd.” Well said.

that should be required reading for all Americans. (This review is printed here for the first time.)

Rushkoff, Douglas Norton (224 pp.) $26.95 | Sept. 6, 2022 978-0-393-88106-6

A media theorist dismantles the tech-centric fantasies of the wealthiest people in the world. In this scathing book, Rushkoff opens with an account of a meeting he attended with five of the world’s richest men, who sought his opinions on their strategies to survive an “Event” that would render the world as we know it unlivable. These men and the rest of their technocrat counterparts suffer from what Rushkoff calls “The Mindset,” a worldview marked by a staunch bias toward quantifiable data and “a faith in technology to solve problems,” especially the problems that those billionaires’ own technologies have wrought. While digital technologies initially offered opportunities for more meaningfully connected and innovative ways of life, Rushkoff argues that the hopes were corrupted by market goals. As a result, new technologies were designed less for consumer satisfaction and more for investor profit. Another major detriment is the winner-take-all attitude among tech “innovators,” who aren’t interested in incremental progress as much as creating a singular invention for which they can take all the credit. However, notes the author, “these totalizing solutions perpetuate the myth that only a technocratic elite can possibly fix our problems.” Rushkoff describes an interesting connection between tech billionaires and the prominence of psychedelics in tech culture, further illustrating the need of the tech elite to believe that they are singularly capable of providing the solutions humankind needs—while getting rich in the process. The idea that technology can remedy the ills that technology created is founded on a faulty belief that only what’s quantifiable has value, but the “squishier” subjects and ways of thinking that explore our dignity and humanity are still important, and it is imperative we don’t leave them behind. Though Rushkoff occasionally displays too evident a disdain for his subjects, he writes with knowledge and authority. The text conveys an appropriately urgent and serious message, while the closing section offers sound reason for hope and reasonable steps to take for a better future.

Tamimi, Ahed & Dena Takruri One World/Random House (288 pp.) $27.00 | Sept. 6, 2022 978-0-593-13458-0

A Palestinian activist recounts her arrest and detention in an Israeli prison when she was just 16.

Tamimi grew up in the village of Nabi Saleh in the West Bank, where her family organized weekly marches to protest Israel’s illegal seizure of a local water source. She grew up terrified by the Israeli army’s brutal tactics, which included nighttime raids, home demolitions, attacks with pepper spray, and murder. As a child, the author “dreaded” the weekly demonstrations until an Israeli soldier shot her in the hand with a rubber-coated bullet while she was trying to escape tear gas that soldiers had launched into her home. At this moment, she writes, she experienced a “numbness” that motivated her to sooth her accumulated trauma through protesting. Unwittingly, Tamimi rose to international fame when she pushed an Israeli soldier after his army shot at a group of children in her village, critically injuring her cousin. At the time, her mother streamed Tamimi’s confrontation on Facebook Live, a decision that later led to Tamimi’s arrest, interrogation, and detention at Hasharon Prison in Israel. The video went viral, launching Tamimi into the international spotlight, a phenomenon the author partly attributes to her light-skinned privilege. Although the attention plunged her into fatigue and depression, she writes, “as worn down as I began to feel, I knew that staying silent wasn’t an option. I had been given a rare platform to advocate for Palestine and its prisoners, and I intended to use it….If educating the world about our nation’s struggle was my mission in this life, I vowed to carry it out as honorably and as effectively as possible.” Writing with journalist Takruri, Tamimi delivers a passionately argued, profoundly empathetic, and deeply informed examination of her country’s occupation. Her circumspection and clarity of thought are matched only by her vulnerability.

Totenberg, Nina Simon & Schuster (256 pp.) $27.99 | Sept. 13, 2022 978-1-982188-08-5

Longtime NPR correspondent Totenberg recounts her friendship with the late Supreme Court justice. Many readers may not know that Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933-2020) studied literature with the

noted (and notorious) Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov at Cornell, “where she truly came alive.” What Totenberg and Ginsburg shared over a half-century friendship, much spent over bowls of bouillabaisse, was a profound love of conversation and learning, to say nothing of the law, to which Totenberg had a sort of trial by fire, covering, among many other events, the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. “For understandable reasons,” she writes, “he’s never granted me an interview, and when we attend the same social events, I keep my distance.” Ginsburg was a devoted student and thoughtful interpreter of the law, which made her invaluable as a member of the court. As the author writes, she also had a gift for being “able to separate fierce intellectual disagreements from personal animus,” which helps explain why the aforementioned Thomas, with whom she often disagreed, paid deeply felt tribute to her after her death. Indeed, counseled Ginsburg, “It helps, sometimes, to be a little deaf when unkind or thoughtless words are spoken.” She has been honored and eulogized countless times since her death in 2020, but, Totenberg reminds us, while Ginsburg sought points of common ground in developing arguments and dissents, she was still the victim of partisan politics. In a typically nasty move, Mitch McConnell denied her a place lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda, which the Senate controls, and she was honored in Statuary Hall, the purview of the House. McConnell did not attend. “Even as many conservatives will welcome a far more conservative, some might say extreme, Court,” Totenberg closes, meaningfully, “many in America may well be surprised to miss a more centrist Court, as they will miss RGB.”

Tyson, Neil deGrasse Henry Holt (288 pp.) $28.99 | Sept. 20, 2022 978-1-250-86150-4

The well-known astrophysicist argues in favor of science. Tyson, popular TV commentator and director of the Hayden Planetarium, points out that until a few centuries ago, all cultures explained natural phenomena through words from wise men (i.e., “authority”), sacred texts, and myths. Life was short, disease-ridden, and violent, and few claimed that important questions remained unanswered or that progress was possible. After the 17th-century Enlightenment, scientific inquiry began delivering explanations that “are true even when you don’t believe in them,” and there followed significant improvements to our quality of life as a species. Even though science has delivered the goods for centuries, Tyson warns against two alternatives. The first, deeply held personal beliefs, are not susceptible to argument and range from the literal truth of the Bible to the superiority of the Dodgers over the Yankees. Personal beliefs are benign unless they become coercive political beliefs, and the intensity of this coercion continues to increase in today’s political climate, sometimes culminating in violence. Tyson urges readers to base their actions on accurate observation—evidence rather than feeling—and a willingness to discard ideas that don’t work. “To deny objective truths is to be scientifically illiterate,” he writes, “not to be ideologically principled.” Among the best sections of the book is an essay in which the author, taking a page from early racist anthropology, delivers a tongue-in-cheek but strictly fact-based argument that Whites resemble chimpanzees far more closely than Blacks do. Marshalling his evidence, he shows “how easy it is to be racist.” Since it’s been proven (scientifically) that humans are terrible at assessing risks, flummoxed by statistics, impervious to facts that contradict their prejudices, and murderously attached to their tribe, Tyson may be fighting a losing battle. Still, he’s a welcome voice in the escalating fight with the array of forces aligned against science and rational thought.

Wenner, Jann S. Little, Brown (592 pp.) $35.00 | Sept. 13, 2022 978-0-316-41519-4

The Rolling Stone founder and publisher recounts a golden age of sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll, and cash flow. As Wenner (b. 1947) admits, he grew up in privilege: His first car was a Jaguar, and he got his first editing gig with the yearbook of his private school. He was swayed from preppiedom with the advent of rock, which he correctly deems a form of “soft power.” Though he missed the Beatles’ legendary performance on The Ed Sullivan Show, he became a devotee after seeing A Hard Day’s Night. This long narrative is bracketed by his 2017 sale of the magazine he founded in 1967, its title borrowed from the Dylan song and not the British band. Soon enough, though, Wenner became friendly with both the Beatles and the Stones. The magazine was revolutionary, especially early on. As the author notes, it “introduced black music to an expanding white audience—not as music for white people created by black people, but as black music in and of itself.” Staffed by the likes of Ben Fong-Torres, Joe Eszterhas, Hunter S. Thompson, and Annie Leibovitz, it also soon became an outlet of choice for musical acts around the world. In fact, John Lennon’s first extensive interview ran in is pages. (Wenner does allow that there were bands that hated the magazine, notably Led Zeppelin.) In time, Wenner decided to abandon the “fading hippie orthodoxy” of San Francisco for the bright lights of New York, where—with the madcap Thompson in tow—Rolling Stone became a journal of politics as much as music, cheering on Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. The author writes frankly about money, sex (including his own long years in the closet), and his regret at selling his creation: “The

new mantra was clear: What counted was not the printed word but the number of ‘hits’ on the website.”

Wong, Alice Vintage (352 pp.) $16.99 paper | Sept. 6, 2022 978-0-593-31539-2

A mixed-media collection of prose and other work by Asian American disability activist Wong. In the introduction, the author, who was born with a form of muscular dystrophy, claims that she never intended to be an activist. On the contrary, she writes, “Ableism conscripted me into activism.” Throughout the book, Wong supports this claim in a series of pieces that describe what it is like for her—and members of the disability community in general—to navigate an ableist world. In one essay, she combines traditional prose with screenshots of text-message chains to recount how she had to drop out of her dream college because changes to Medicaid made it impossible for her to retain the health aides she needed to survive on campus. In another essay peppered with screenshots and newspaper headlines, Wong describes the injustices she faced in trying to access a Covid-19 vaccine as a high-risk individual. The essays are not just limited to writing about disability, though: The author also includes a StoryCorps conversation she recorded with her mother about Lunar New Year traditions, a guide to conducting interviews for radio and other media, and an illustrated ode to cats. As a result, Wong’s collection provides a truly multidimensional portrait of a disabled writer effectively fighting the tendency of able-bodied people to treat the disability community as a monolith, an idea the author effectively deconstructs throughout the book. Not just beautifully written, the book is formally innovative, incorporating fiction (most notably, science fiction) and illustrated elements that are both profoundly insightful and consistently creative. Wong’s grasp of social justice issues is as impressive as her ability to explain complex ideas clearly, passionately, and often humorously. “A memoir can only provide a glimpse of a person,” she writes, “and I am presenting one that is framed by me for nefarious purposes that you will discover one day if you dare.”

Yacovone, Donald Pantheon (480 pp.) $32.50 | Sept. 13, 2022 978-0-593-31663-4

Education can be liberating. However, as this provocative survey demonstrates, it can also uphold the worst of the status quo.

“As for Sambo, whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears…there is some reason to believe that he suffered less than any class in the South from its ‘peculiar institution.’ ” The authors of that statement were Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, two eminent historians whose work is still studied today. As Yacovone, an associate at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African American Research, observes, the textbook in which that spectacularly racist—and incorrect—statement occurs was a standard for many years. Beginning with the founding of the republic, writes Yacovone, textbooks have been primary instruments for transmitting “ideas of white American identity,” even asserting that this identity is definitively White and that, as one 1896 textbook stated, “to the Caucasian race by reason of its physical and mental superiority has been assigned the task of civilizing and enlightening the world.” Current textbooks have plenty of problems, as well. Yacovone points out that only in the last decade have Texas history textbooks acknowledged slavery, and not states’ rights, as the primary cause of the Civil War. It is from history textbooks, he adds, that the terms White supremacy and master race entered the lexicon, and it has been from textbooks that excuses for the subjugation of some peoples and extermination of others have found learned justification. Even textbooks—and Yacovone has pored over hundreds—that condemned the secessionist movement were often inclined to consider the enslaved population as “a degraded and inferior people.” Interestingly, the author links some of the worst excesses to the anti-communist fervor of the Cold War era, when textbook publishers and authors were avid to erase differences between North and South—White differences, anyway.