Favorite Books of 2021.

• Date: 01 December 2021

Ruth Conniff

Refugee High: Coming of Age in America (The New Press), by Elly Fishman, tells the story of four teenagers from four different countries--Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, and Myanmar--who land at Roger C. Sullivan High School in Chicago, home to more refugee students than any other high school in Illinois. Principal Chad Adams and Sarah Quintenz, the big-hearted, foul-mouthed director of the school's English Language Learners program, share a vision of Sullivan as a welcoming place for new American teens, supporting and challenging them to succeed in their new country.

Elly Fishman spent the 2017-2018 school year at Sullivan, following the teenagers and their families, teachers, and friends. That year happened to coincide with one of the worst global refugee crises in history as well as a massive increase in pressure on immigrants in the United States from President Donald Trump's aggressive policies and escalating public hostility.

You can't help but root for the kids in this book, who struggle to overcome trauma and dislocation as well as the common heartaches of adolescence--and the terrible reality that the violence and poverty that caused them to flee their countries still stalk them like a recurring nightmare in Chicago.

As Alejandro, who witnessed his best friends murder by gangs in Guatemala and fled before he met the same fate, awaits his asylum hearing, his classmate is shot by gang members near Sullivan. Shahina resists her parents' determined efforts to force her into an arranged marriage, and makes a harrowing escape after she is kidnapped in another state.

Despite such extreme circumstances, the kids at Sullivan are mostly engaged in regular kid stuff, and their teachers see them as whole people. Fishman's clear-eyed, empathetic portraits are a powerful rebuke to the nativism and bigotry that have gripped our country.

A Promised Land (Crown), by Barack Obama, is a hefty 701-page memoir--and it's only Volume I!--that came out at the end of 2020, just after our last year-end review. The former President is a good writer, and this is a thoughtful book, not a ghost-written product meant to burnish his image.

Obama confesses to self-doubt, and while his accounts of the war in Afghanistan, Wall Street bailouts, and other disappointments won't assuage progressive critics, it is a humanizing read. It's also poignant to look back now, in this poisoned political era, at the optimism that propelled Obama's first presidential campaign, his search for common ground, and the idealism of his young supporters.

Obama, who saw the future of Republican politics in Sarah Palin, muses about whether John McCain would have chosen her as a running mate if he knew what he was starting. But while the ugly, know-nothing politics of the Palin/Trump variety continue to plague us, this book is a reminder of our nation's better angels and the possibility that they could, again, ascend.

Ruth Conniff is editor-at-large for The Progressive and editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Examiner.

Mike Ervin

Melanie Morrison was "euphoric" when she discovered that the Lillian E. Smith Center for the arts was offering a writing residency. As she recalls in Letters from Old Screamer Mountain (Resource Center for Women & Ministry in the South), "To find a place of solitude and beauty in the mountains of North Georgia was appealing in and of itself; to be on the very mountain where Lillian Smith wrote Strange Fruit (1944) and Killers of the Dream (1949) was more than I could imagine."

Morrison's parents revered Smith. Her picture hung on a wall in Morrison's childhood home.

The two Smith books, the first a novel and the second a collection of essays, were about the tragic failure of white people to own up to the societal destruction wrought by racism in the United States. Smith and her life partner, Paula Snelling, operated the Laurel Falls Camp for girls on the same site from the 1920s to the 1940s. Morrison's mother, Eleanor, attended a weekend session at Laurel Falls as a college student in 1939, which Morrison describes as "an unforgettable turning point in my mother's young life."

Morrison conducts anti-racism seminars for white people. She planned to use her residency to write essays about the horror of lynching. In 2000, Morrison opened the Leaven Center in rural Michigan, which, she says in the book, was devoted to "equipping participants to become more effective and knowledgeable agents of social change." (I attended many Leaven retreats, and Morrison presided over my wedding in 2006.)

But when Morrison's residency began in July 2012, she was feeling "ambivalent." Leaven had closed due to financial pressures less than a year earlier, and Morrison was still mourning that loss. At the same time, she was immersing herself in pictures and accounts of lynchings. So during her residency she wrote letters to her mother, who was descending into dementia, "describing the avalanche of emotions and epiphanies I was experiencing."

Morrison never shared the letters with her mother because of her dementia, but they're published in this book.

"The historical amnesia about lynching is the silence that weighs heavily on my spirit, Mom," she writes in one letter. "If this reign of terror remains unacknowledged by the descendants of its white perpetrators, we can be certain that the lies and fears that fomented lynching will continue to infect our white psyches and imaginations."

Letters from Old Screamer Mountain is an engaging tale of love, grief, healing, and family connection.

Mike Ervin is a columnist for The Progressive.

Brian Gilmore

The title of John Thompson's book, I Came As a Shadow: An Autobiography (Henry Holt and Company), comes from "Nocturne Varial," a poem written by his uncle, the Harlem Renaissance poet Lewis Grandison Alexander: "I came as a shadow / I stand now a light."

That the legendary Georgetown University basketball coach would pick such a literary reference is no surprise. He was a man who respected intellectual pursuits just as much as the game.

Thompson was the first African American coach to win the NCAA Division I Men's Championship in 1984. When asked at the time how it felt, he called the question "insulting, because it implied that Black coaches before me had not been good enough to win a championship." That was Thompson--he fought racism his way with every fiber of his being.

Growing up in Washington, D.C., Thompson was himself an accomplished basketball player. His working-class parents stressed education and hard work, which he embraced. He made it to the NBA, playing for the Boston Celtics for two years, but found his true calling as an educator, calling himself "a...