OYENTE

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You thought being a mom in the city was bad

Total
3 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
3 out of 5 stars
Historia
3 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 03-16-25

I can’t help thinking this book was written as an act of revenge. After they get married, I don’t think she has one good memory of her husband. Her life as she tells it is one episode of utter exhaustion and overwhelm after the next. Her joyful moments with her kids have that humble-braggy quality that a lot of Mom-lit does, like “I’m a saint for considering myself blessed, because actually this sucks.” At one point during a power outage she says “this isn’t cozy like Little House on the Prairie.” Well, no, but the Ingalls family *was* caught in a 6month long blizzard with no food. A lot depends on what you focus on. Read in a tremulous voice that makes you wonder whether she will ever be ok. I’m a Mom and a feminist and I appreciate it when a woman doesn’t sugarcoat how hard it is to sustain a messy life, especially one as hard as farming. But I picked out this book for some balance (it has a lot of good recipes) and it wasn’t there.

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How much I was told to accept abuse

Total
3 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
3 out of 5 stars
Historia
2 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 12-14-23

I just listened to a bunch of stuff about how I have to normalize and accept sexual, verbal, and emotional abuse from my neurodivergent partner. I bought this book hoping to get some back-up and strategies for boundaries and validating my experience of what we would otherwise call abusive behaviors, Nope. I got a lot about how I have to “understand” and be positive, but astonishingly nothing about how I am supposed to function under these conditions. I have a lot of empathy for my partner, but I need more than how I have to do more for him, and expect nothing, to be my normal day to day life. Honestly, after reading this book, I would say, if there is nothing at all to be done to live with an ADHD partner besides know your life is going to be a living hell taking care of them and wanting no backup at all, just DO NOT get into a relationship with an ADHD person so you won’t need this advice. If you’re reading this book, it’s too late, and this expert is not going to help you.

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Doesn’t live up to the promising title

Total
2 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
3 out of 5 stars
Historia
2 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 12-13-22

Bought this book hoping for a thorough history of African presence in Europe from Roman times to the present, as told from an African-European perspective. Instead, this is a phoned-in catalogue of mythical figures, flat portrayals of what must have been truly fascinating historical actors, padded with long passages of academic theories and quotes from other writers that you would only read if you went back to grad school. It strings together pedantic sketches of obscure saints and scribes known (unfortunately) mostly to academics, and yet perplexingly ignores some of the most compelling examples of both the “white” view of African immigrants (like Othello) and well-documented individuals like General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, whose dramatic life and death from the Haitian Revolution to Napoleon was told by Tom Reiss in “The Black Count.”
This book is at its best when taking a deep dive into subjects like the complex social interactions between African women and their Danish marriage prospects in the author’s native Senegal. But then it bewilderingly careens into Danish-American political relations around the Danish centennial commemoration in 2012 (maybe it was 2012; the switch was so jarring I can’t quite recall).
This book got a lot of praise, and maybe it deserves some for being an early attempt to write a story that is difficult to capture, given the paucity of firsthand accounts from African immigrants and their dual heritage descendants prior to the 19th century.
But readers will have to wait for the kind of creative, confident, comprehensive account of what it was like to be an African European during the multicultural Roman Empire, the East/West merchant routes of the Middle Ages, the robust international scholarly exchange of the Renaissance, or the complex political dynamics of the global slave trade. I really hope some student of Dr. Otele is working on that book right now.

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