Adoptees of color speak out against the rush to "save" the children of Haiti by removing them from their country. Cautions like this – in fact, alarms, outrage, action, worldwide solidarity in defense of the children of Haiti – are more than warranted. Terrible tales are emerging of the already brisk trafficking in Haitian children, whose lives are now valued at $50 each.
Read Andrea Shalal-Esa's take on "the pigeonholing of Arab-American writers" at Behind the Lines.
I just read the review of Louise Erdrich's new novel Shadow Tag in this coming Sunday's New York Times Book Review. The reviewer's repeated return to the question of whether the novel is Erdrich's fictionalizing of her own marriage to Michael Dorris annoyed the hell out of me, but then I got to the information that a key character in the novel is named Louise. Well. Regardless, it sounds like another winner from this fine writer.
"We're being political whether we like it or not." Courttia Newland on Black writers, interviewed in London's Catch A Vibe. (Link via Fledgeling.)
This looks like an important book. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. Painful and infuriating, too, as so many important books are. There are echoes here, it seems to me, of the Tuskegee Experiment.
