jesse_the_k | Two GREAT Books: Life in Code and Real American

Life in Code—Ellen Ullman print, ebook

I am putty in Ellen Ullman’s hands: I’ve loved every one of her books--my review of By Blood. This memoir explores the puzzles of software programming and videotape wrangling while also inquiring into emotions, status, personal and local history. Ullmann understood the dangers of the surveillance state way back in the 1980s. She hopes that demystifying coding and algorithms may protect us from even worse in the near future.

An eloquent assessment of the 2010s seekers in San Francisco:

Dreams of internet success impose a heavy burden on the recent immigrants. The newcomers soon find themselves buzzing like flies in the sticky paper of the startup life. The ethos that surrounds them says that founding a successful company — getting round after round of venture-capital funding, their startup then valued in the billions — is the measure of the highest personal achievement. It is best to be the CEO; it is satisfactory to be an early employee, maybe the fifth or sixth or perhaps the tenth. Alternately, one may become an engineer devising precious algorithms in the cloisters of Google and its like. Otherwise, one becomes a mere employee. A coder of websites at Facebook is no one in particular. A manager at Microsoft is no one. A person (think woman) working in customer relations is a particular type of no one, banished to the bottom, as always, for having spoken directly to a non-technical human being. All these and others are ways for strivers to fall by the wayside — as the startup culture sees it — while their betters race ahead of them. Those left behind may see themselves as ordinary, even failures.

Excerpt on the Verge https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/29/16193444/ellen-ullman-life-in-code-book-excerpt-silicon-valley-startup

Read if … You’re interested in the early history of the net, 70s–90s San Francisco, bubble/bust economics, what programming feels like, the value of online education.

Avoid if … You believe that venture capitalists are a force for good in the economy

Real American—Julie Lythcott-Haims print, ebook, Audible audio

Lythcott-Haims’ memoir of racial identity is stunning. She explores its meaning from two sides, because she grew up a biracial child in the last quarter of the 20th century. This book addresses why “biracial” and “mixed” are such complex identities.

In her early years, she internalized racism so well she viewed herself as a white person would. Through the experiences she narrates beautifully, simply, and brutally, she became a proud Black woman with a White mother and a Black father.

It Begins Like This

I.

“Where are you from?”

“Here.”

“No, I mean, where are you from from?”

As a child growing up in the seventies and early eighties in New York, Wisconsin, and Northern Virginia, there was something about my skin color and hair texture that snagged the attention of white children and adults. Their need to make sense of me—to make something of sense out of nonsensical me—was pressing. My existence was a ripple in an otherwise smooth sheet. They needed to iron it down.

[The truth is, I’m not really from here.]

[The truth is, that’s not what they were asking.]

II.

The truth is, they were asking, “Why are you so different from what I know? So unclassifiable?”

There’s love at first sight. There’s American at first sight. And from dozens of “where are you from” interactions with Americans over the years, I’ve learned that American at first sight is about looks—primarily skin color and hair texture—not nationality.

I am the wooly-haired, medium-brown-skinned offspring typical when Blacks and whites have sex, which was considered illegal activity in seventeen of the fifty “united” states in 1966.

Nineteen sixty-six was the year before the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Loving v. Virginia that the laws preventing interracial marriage were unconstitutional, and 1966 was the year in which my Black father and white mother, an African American doctor and a British teacher who met in West Africa, chose to go ahead and get married anyway. They married in Accra, Ghana. I was born to them in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1967.

I come from people who broke the rules. Chose to live lives outside the box. Chose hope over hate as the arc of history was forced to bend a bit more toward justice. I am the goo in the melting pot.

Rhetorically championed.

Theoretically accepted.

Actually suspect.

In places hated.

Despised.

[…snip…]

V.

I came from Silvey.

I am the untallied, unpaid, unrepented damages of one of America’s founding crimes. I come from people who endured the psycho-cultural genocide of slavery, reconstruction, and Jim Crow. Who began to find a place here really only quite recently amid strides toward effecting a more perfect union, of liberty and justice for all.

I am Silvey’s great-great-great-great-granddaughter. She was a slave who worked on a plantation in the late 1700s in Charleston, South Carolina, the harbor town through which close to one in two African slaves entered America over the centuries. Silvey bore three children by her master, Joshua Eden, by which I mean he raped her; there is no consent in slavery. Silvey’s daughter Silvia was born in 1785, and Joshua freed Silvey, Silvia, and their other children some years later. Silvia gave birth to a son named Joshua in 1810. Joshua had a son named Joshua Jr., born in 1845. His daughter, Evelyn, was born in 1896. Evelyn bore my father, George, in 1918. And I was born to him in 1967.

The original Americans are the natives whose land was invaded then stolen by the Europeans. Those descended from the Europeans, the ones who came on ships to the New World, like to think they are the original Americans. But I’m from a third set—from those brought here on different ships over different waters, those whose sweat and muscle were the engine of the American economy for over two hundred years, whose blood and tears watered America’s ground. I come from them.

I come from people who survived what America did to them.

Ain’t I a Real American?

Excerpt on the publisher’s site: https://us.macmillan.com/excerpt?isbn=9781250137746

Read if … You’re a white person in America

Avoid if … Don’t. Read it anyway

Two GREAT Books: Life in Code and Real American

no subject

no subject