The yogurt was a bit difficult to get my hands on. My boyfriend and I went around to two different stores and came out empty handed, though finally we went to the “rich” part of town and found it in their grocery store. Relief! My long, hard search ended in success when I had been worried about certain failure. We selected our two yogurts, one blueberry and one plain. Since lately I have been very vitamin aware, I was pleasured to learn that Yoplait Greek contains a large amount of protein, as well as vitamins A and D.

The one thing I noticed right away about the yogurt was its thickness. It’s thicker than typical yogurt, a lot more creamy. Sort of the texture of… sour cream. Stirring it up to mix in the blueberries at the bottom made it fluffy, but it still retained its thick heaviness. As opposed to the sweet taste of typical yogurt, the Greek style Yoplait had a slightly sour taste. I was a bit worried about this, as the date on my yogurt was well before the sell by time, so I did a little of online looking to discover that this sourness is normal. All in all, it had a really distinct and unique flavor and texture. It was yogurt-y, but yet very different. A good yogurt, though? Yes, yes it is.

Giveaway!
One lucky winner will be chosen to receive a Yoplait Greek’s “Nourish Your Inner Goddess” gift pack that contains two coupons to try out the yogurt for yourself. But anyone can get a coupon to save $.30 off of a Yoplait Greek yogurt. All you have to do is go here and download/print.

To enter the contest, all you have to do is answer the following question:
How do you get in touch with your own inner god or goddess?

For extra entries (post each in a new comment to be counted as separate entries):
Tweet this contest and leave the link to your Tweet (+1)
Blog about this contest or link it from your sidebar (+1)
Share this on Facebook or Myspace (+1)

The contest ends Sunday, June 13th, 11:59pm.

Sweepstakes

Wendy’s Minding Spot (June 15th)

JoJos Book Corner (June 18th)

Lauren’s Crammed Bookshelf (June 21st)

Melissa’s Bookshelf (June 12th)

Sara Weiss thought that I seemed like a simple young woman, and she decided I was incredibly lucky to have been given such a gift, as she considered it. She believed everything Lattesta had told her about what had happened at the Pyramid, because underneath her practical approach to life there was a streak of mysticism.

- Dead and Gone (Charlaine Harris), pg. 111

Dead in the Family (Sookie Stackhouse, Book 10) by Charlaine Harris (Purchased from Barnes and Noble)
After enduring torture and the loss of loved ones during the brief but deadly Faery War, Sookie Stackhouse is hurt and she’s angry. Just about the only bright spot in her life is the love she thinks she feels for vampire Eric Northman. But he’s under scrutiny by the new Vampire King because of their relationship. And as the political implications of the Shifters coming out are beginning to be felt, Sookie’s connection to the Shreveport pack draws her into the debate. Worst of all, though the door to Faery has been closed, there are still some Fae on the human side-and one of them is angry at Sookie. Very, very angry…

Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino (Purchased from Barnes & Noble)
Readers with a taste for ambiguity and oddball characters will enjoy this twisted novel of suspense from Japanese author Kirino (Out). The Apartment Serial Murders case, which involved the brutal killings of two Tokyo prostitutes, has gripped the country, leading to the arrest of a Chinese immigrant, Zhang Zhe-zhong, for the crimes. Strangely, Zhang freely admits to murdering the first victim, Yuriko Hirata, but denies the near-identical slaying 10 months later of Kazue Sato. The events leading to the killings are related from a variety of perspectives—that of Yuriko’s unnamed older sister, bitterly jealous of her sibling’s good looks; of each victim; and of the accused. Unusual connections—for example, Kazue was a classmate of the older sister—cast doubt on the veracity of individual narrators. This mesmerizing tale of betrayal reveals some sobering truths about Japan’s social hierarchy.

Radiant Shadows by Melissa Marr
Katie’s Book Blog

Blood Born by Linda Howard and Linda Jones
Readaholic

Daughters of the Witching Hill by Mary Sharratt
A Bookworm’s World

Long story short: will be buying books or reading my backlog, not accepting offers or tours.

I WILL get through a large portion of this stack, cross my heart. As it is, I have a few books waiting that I need to write reviews for. Okay. MORE than a few. No matter, though. The whole point of this post is to say that I don’t want to call this feature ‘In the Mail’ since hardly any (if any at all) will come from the mail. Instead, my wallet.

Without further ado…

Dead and Gone (Sookie Stackhouse 9) by Charlaine Harris (Purchased from Barnes and Noble)
The Louisiana town of Bon Temps—along with the rest of the world—is about to be rocked with some big supernatural news: like the vampires before them, the Were people—humans with the ability to change into animals—are about to reveal themselves to humanity. Psychic barmaid Sookie Stackhouse is apprehensive about the revelation, given the way some people in the small town revile anyone with extraordinary powers, including Sookie herself. While the initial announcement seems to go over smoothly with most people, tragedy strikes when Sookie’s brother Jason’s estranged wife, a werepanther, is found murdered and nailed up on a cross. Jason is the prime suspect, but Sookie has even bigger problems to deal with when she learns that a vicious fairy prince is determined to kill her. Darker and more ominous than earlier entries in the series, Harris’ latest raises the stakes (pun intended) for lovable heroine Sookie and comes up a winner.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith (Purchased from Barnes and Noble)
Following the success of his bestselling Pride and Prejudice and Zombies with another mélange of history and horror, Grahame-Smith inserts a grandiose and gratuitous struggle with vampires into Abraham Lincoln’s life. Lincoln learns at an early age that his mother was killed by a supernatural predator. This provokes his bloody but curiously undocumented lifelong vendetta against vampires and their slave-owning allies. The author’s decision to reduce slavery to a mere contrivance of the vampires is unfortunate bordering on repellent, but at least it does distract the reader from the central question of why the president never saw fit to inform the public of the supernatural menace. Grahame-Smith stitches hand-to-hand vampire combat into Lincoln’s documented life with competent prose that never quite manages to convince.

In Black Bangor: African Americans in a Maine Community, 1880-1950, author Maureen Elgersman Lee attempts to fill what she calls a void in the narrative of the African American experience in one of the whitest states America, Maine (xiv). Lee is primarily focused on answering a few specific questions about the Bangor black community: what did it mean to be black in Bangor, how did Bangor’s small black population create their own community, and how did they live within a white majority. To answer her questions, Lee sections her book into four topical chapters. Chapter one investigates the migration and settlement of African Americans and foreign blacks into Maine, and specifically Bangor. Chapter two describes the sort of labor the black Bangor population was involved in. Chapter three portrays the daily life of a black citizen of Bangor. Chapter four is about how the blacks of Bangor used already existing institutions and also created their own to meet their needs. Lee states in her introduction that she will start each chapter with snippets of the lives of select Bangor citizens as a way to illustrate the points she makes within (xvii). Lee offers full disclosure of the problems of her usable sources, announcing to the reader from the start that the federal census data she uses contains gaps that can be filled in only so much by narrowing state statistics to a local level, and that the manuscript census too contains errors due to illegibility and fire damage (xviii).

In chapter one, Lee spends a great deal of time discussing numbers and percentages. While these are intended to give the reader the statistics and scope of black settlement in Maine, and then specifically Bangor, the author could have presented her figures in a more succinct and less scattered way. Fortunately, Lee was able to clear up some of the confusion caused by too many numbers in one paragraph by providing a simple table of population and percentages (4). In this way, she more easily compared black populations to white, accounted for dates, and showed what her numbers were intended in a way much easier to grasp and understand (4). With the table present, it is unnecessary for her to repeat the information in text because it only serves to weaken the overall readability of her book. Chapter one also introduces the reader to a number of black Bangor residents whom Lee will refer back to throughout her book. After four chapters of names and families, especially without the direct benefit of chronological organization, the individuals easily become one mix of confusing references. Lee should have included an appendix in the back of her novel for reference, including each individual’s job(s), address, income, spouse, children, and any known organizational links. Further along in the book, Lee discusses the specific regions, or wards, in Bangor that blacks settled. Taking this a step further, she disseminates which streets they lived on and the rent costs they paid. A small and insufficient map is provided to allow the reader to follow along this geographical journey (54). A larger map with actual readable street names would help to place the story characters, and make it a great deal easier to follow Lee’s geographical discussion.

For what Lee tries to address, she addresses little of what it truly meant to be black in a white dominated Bangor. Lee comes to the conclusion that Linda Brooks Davis’s work at Union Station as a restroom attendant was relatively free of racism, and was in fact more split along class than racial boundaries. This analysis of experience is reached from personal testimony by Davis herself. Yet historians know that the memory is a tricky and often unreliable thing and that people will not disclose what they do not want others to know. It is also very relevant that Davis’s testimony was part of a newspaper article written when she retired from Union Station, hardly a forum for her to discuss the racial ills of her work environment. The ultimate conclusion about racism and segregation is that military training camps during WWII brought segregation to Bangor, and that there was little racial trouble before then (108). Again, this is taken from an interview that was published as part of a book on the African American experience across the United States, and does not include any study of events throughout the course of the 1880-1950 period to illustrate or contradict the assumption of general racial peace in Bangor. Yet Lee gives hints here and there that all was not racially well in Bangor, Maine. For example, the black citizens were faced every day with racist caricatures of themselves used in film and advertising (81). Schools, though integrated, self-segregated, and the two races did not do a lot of social mixing, though it appears they thought favorably of one another (88 & 99-104). Additionally, as Lee points out, the black citizens had their own small NAACP chapter and kept updated on national events (120). It almost seems as if Lee wants to, at times, truly set apart the black Bangor population by isolating them and making them distinctly different from the rest of the African American population, as they seem so little impacted by racism and impervious to the social problems related to black life in America pre-civil rights. It is a shame also that her source limitations do not allow readers to know how foreign blacks settling in Maine maintained some of their own cultural traditions or institutions within the larger community since, as we know, the black community is not one unified group with the same interests and concerns.

Lee recognizes the inadequacy of her sources best in her statement that “they cannot replicate the breadth or the depth of the socially intimate experiences of African Americans at the time” (87). Due to the limits of her sources, Lee is left to make a lot of conjecture about the people she studies and their daily lives. In some cases this is necessary and warranted when evidence points to it. In other cases, Lee stretches reality and assumption too far. It is not necessary to assume, for example, that Carrie Drymond was influenced by a certain advertisement for a stove in order to include in the book the interesting tidbit about the stove itself (75). To illustrate further, Lee assumes that relatively poorer African Americans used investments and tips from their jobs to supplement their income in order to purchase into middle class luxury (80). There is simply no way for Lee to know this, or to be able to verify where the income was spent, especially because she is only looking at house rents and mortgages, not the totality of financial burden on one individual or family. Again, this is due to the scarceness of her sources, which afford her a very snapshot and small look at the individuals within the Bangor community. Making so many unsubstantiated claims negates the intellectual value of her more correct analyses such as when she postulated that the structure of the Maine school system might have limited the opportunities available to African American students (97).

Lee is without a doubt fully engaged in the lives of the black Bangor population. The interviews she uses, the personal experiences she recounts, and the ways in which she brings life to a group of people for which there is little known about is fascinating. Despite the weaknesses inherent in the scant sources, the personalities of each individual come out to the forefront of her stories. This book would perhaps be a better depiction of the black Bangor experience if she had focused her book a bit on the people. It would have been a better read and just as informative if she had chosen to instead focus on just the people and let them speak for themselves. In that case, the book would have flowed along on a person-by-person basis and gain a cohesiveness that is not part of the book because it is written in such a way that it jumps around by date and person throughout the various topics. Lee was right when she said that there is little known about blacks in Bangor, and that there is indeed an historical void because there is little evidence left from which historians can create narratives.

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Disclaimer(s):

- More can be found in my Reviews section or on my Biblio page. If you would like to see my book list for 2009, go here.

- If you would like me to review your book, send an email to me at morbidromantic@gmail.com. Read my Book Review Policy for more information.

1. This review was done as part of a graded assignment.

In what author Raymond Arsenault calls the first historical study of the Freedom Rides, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice is a journalistic and chronological narrative that separates, but does not isolate, the Freedom Rides from the broader context of the Civil Rights movement. Arsenault’s revisionist styled history addresses the lack of historical focus on the Freedom Rides itself, which he claims has so far only been discussed by historians as a “prelude to the climactic events” of later civil rights efforts and never on its own for its own significance (7). To Arsenault, the Freedom Rider movement was a transformative event that ushered in an era of citizen politics vital to the entire civil rights struggle (8). To tell a story that speaks of personal sacrifice and bravery, and a willingness to place oneself in personal harm for the most basic recognition of rights, the human element cannot be ignored. When the Freedom Riders decided to challenge their right to desegregated interstate bus travel, a right upheld by the Supreme Court, they took a personal and dangerous stand against the vehemently racist Deep South. To portray the humanity of the Freedom Rides, Arsenault says he will let the players speak for themselves throughout his monograph (9). In this, Arsenault is very successful. Using a vast archive of manuscripts that includes personal papers and scrapbooks, as well as court decisions, newspapers, government publications, and interviews, Arsenault imbues Freedom Riders with a poignancy that cannot come from chronological narration and analysis alone. For example, to depict the chaos of the Montgomery, Alabama riot of May 20th, Arsenault chooses to use the words of John Lewis himself, whose emotional and personal account of the event lends to the story an element of dramatic immediacy that academic language could never do justice to (212).

To assume that Arsenault’s intent is to strictly isolate the Freedom Rides from the larger picture would be incorrect. The Civil Rights movement as a whole was dominated by different groups and people, all of whom engaged in an interplay of alliance, faction, and inspiration. In one of the most extensive studies of Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) by David Garrow, Bearing the Cross, little attention is paid to the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and their involvement with King and the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). In Garrow’s interpretation, the relationship between King and FOR was based on FOR’s curiosity about King and the Montgomery boycott. When members of FOR found out King was interested in Gandhi and passive resistance, they helped provide resources to teach him more about it.² Arsenault contributes a new element to the dynamic relationship by instead insisting that the link between the two was stronger than mere curiosity and sideline influence. According to Arsenault, King and the MIA was dependant on FOR’s leadership, and it was the FOR movement that instilled the ideas of Gandhian nonviolence into King, which he would utilize passionately (70). To Garrow, it was a matter of refinement of an already adopted idea. To Arsenault, it was because of FOR that the MIA adopted the practice.

Arsenault does similarly when he describes the legacy of the Freedom Rides. Due to what he sees as an historical lack of importance attributed to the Freedom Rides, it is essential for Arsenault’s to define what the importance of the Freedom Riders was and remains. This required him to look outside of the Freedom Rides themselves and account for how the Freedom Rides inspired future civil rights developments. Arsenault states that the Freedom Riders nationalized their movement and would later move on to direct, participate, and inspire future acts of civil defiance such as the March on Washington, the Freedom Summer, and various voting registration drives (507). Arsenault is perhaps a bit guilty of overstating the importance of the movement itself. While the Freedom Rides no doubt inspired many, and many future Civil Rights activists would look back to the bravery of the riders for guidance, the Freedom Riders were one of several groups functioning. King and the NAACP had voting registration projects distinct from anything the Freedom Riders did, for instance. If anything, the experience gained by all of the Freedom Riders as they challenged racism head on would equip them to lead and teach others, and Arsenault is right to point this out. By participating in the Freedom Rides, many young students developed a taste for action. After surviving the violence of the KKK in Alabama and Mississippi, there was little left for them to fear of the white South, though they never underestimated the violence possible. This bravery would disseminate throughout the movement and inspire, and tested practices of nonviolence and passive resistance would be adopted by other groups. Arsenault was correct in this conclusion. The Freedom Rides was part of a whole rather than a pinnacle.

Another one of the major successes of the book is how Arsenault fits the Freedom Riders into the political culture of the time, and also within what is happening throughout the world. Again, Arsenault removes the rides from isolation, and this time to surround them in a national and world context. In terms of the federal government, Arsenault adequately shows that the Freedom Riders exposed the tensions between federal and state governments, and also forced the national government to act in favor of them if only to protect the image of the country from bad media coverage. The federal government, as Arsenault depicts, was relatively inadequate to the task of forcing state and local governments to comply with their terms. The weaknesses of the Kennedy Administration, Hoover and the FBI, and the Supreme Court is at center stage with the Freedom Riders. Yet Arsenault rightfully too inserts further complexity in matters of election; President John F. Kennedy could not risk losing support and thus had to act in a manner that would anger his supporters the least (221-222, 244-246). Attorney General Robert Kennedy worried over whether to send federal marshals into Montgomery to quell the hostile situation there because he did not want the moral authority of the United States to be mitigated by much publicized white violence (221). The Freedom Riders, too, were very aware of what was happening in the world. African Americans throughout the United States simultaneously applauded South African apartheid protestors and lamented their similar struggles, and felt that if Africans could bring an end to colonialism and gain independence, so too could they gain their freedom (201, 431).

The Freedom Rides were a complex series of rides with a rotating cast of participants who came and went over the course. Different organizations and student groups started rides of their own such as the Nashville group who decided to continue after the first Freedom Ride lest white violence become the norm against them. As a result, tracing the pattern of rides and people can get a bit difficult to follow. Thankfully, Arsenault provides maps that trace the routes of different groups, and maps that section parts of major cities off to give a geographical sense of the project. However, his text would have been easier to follow had he found a way to identify the different Freedom Ride groups in a distinct and consistent manner. Referring to every different ride as just Freedom Ride or the riders as only Freedom Riders makes for a confusing chronology. It would benefit readers more had Arsenault named each group in a manner that would recognize them more specifically, such as Nashville Freedom Riders or Mississippi Freedom Rides like he does on his map routes. The consistency alone would help connect the text to the maps and make them work in better support of each other. This does not in any way diminish the work Arsenault has produced. He states that he has set out to describe the Freedom Rides and place them back on the list of momentous Civil Rights events, and he does. The Freedom Rides are no longer just a marginal event overshadowed by King or NAACP, but an individual movement that too would motivate others while drawing the overall movement into the national eye.
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Disclaimer(s):

- More can be found in my Reviews section or on my Biblio page. If you would like to see my book list for 2009, go here.

- If you would like me to review your book, send an email to me at morbidromantic@gmail.com. Read my Book Review Policy for more information.

1. This review was done as part of a graded assignment
2. David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr., and the Southern Leadership Conference (New York: Perennial Classics, 2004): 67-70.

Hotel Transylvania by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (Paperbackswap)
The classic tale that introduced the legendary Le Comte de Saint-Germain, first published in 1978 and spawning 14 titles in the Saint-Germain epic, is now available in paperback. A fixture in 1740s Parisian society, Saint-Germain is a perfect gentleman–and a vampire. When the fiery young Madeline falls in love with him, a group of evil sorcerers targets her for their black mass–and only Saint-Germain can save her soul.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (Paperbackswap)
The elegance of Ishiguro’s prose and the pitch-perfect voice of his narrator conspire to usher readers convincingly into the remembered world of Hailsham, a British boarding school for special students. The reminiscence is told from the point of view of Kathy H., now 31, whose evocation of the sheltered estate’s sunlit rolling hills, guardians, dormitories, and sports pavilions is imbued with undercurrents of muted tension and foreboding that presage a darker reality. As an adult, Kathy re-engages in lapsed friendships with classmates Ruth and Tommy, examining the details of their shared youth and revisiting with growing awareness the clues and anecdotal evidence apparent to them even as youngsters that they were different from everyone outside. [...] Ishiguro conveys with exquisite sensitivity the emotional texture of the threesome’s relationship, their bonds of personal loyalty that overcome fractures of trust, the palpable boundaries of hope, and the human capacity for forgiveness. Highly recommended for literary merit and as an exceptional platform for the discussion of a controversial topic.