book spotlight: the war room by bryan malessa
A while back, I reviewed “The Flight” by Byran Malessa. That book was about one family’s escape from Germany in 1945. Bryan has written a sequel called “The War Room.” The book is fiction, but draws heavily from his own life. The major theme is growing up the son of a German migrant and being ashamed. The books deals with a lot of hard themes, such as the legacy of Nazism, race in the South, and sexual identity.
There’s a lot to recommend the book. The books reads very smoothly and one quickly identifies with the main character. The exploration of German American identity is crucial and interesting, as the war forced America’s largest ethnic group to go underground. America is an unacknowledged German state. Another distinctive feature of the book is that the main character picked up competitive cycling as a career for a while. One gets a solid account of how people lose themselves in sport, as well as a gripping presentation of a subject that most Americans know little about.
I’ll finish with a personal note. This book is Bryan’s response to his life. In the epilogue, he describes his time at UC Berkeley, where I met him, and his experiences in Ethnic Studies classes. He, apparently, had a very hard time relating his experience to his Chicano and African American class mates. Unsurprisingly, they found it hard to accept that there was something very problematic in being consciously German American in 1990s America. This book is his way to explaining this issue.
As for myself, I had a different experience at Berkeley. I observed Ethnic Studies from a distance, before I was interested in sociology. Memories of the students in those classes remained for years, leading me to wonder about the origins of these academic programs. Later, I’d write my own book on the topic, asking how such an ethnically conscious institution could survive in a post-Civil Rights society. Our two books, fiction and social science, still show that there’s still a lot to be written about how American formulate the heritage.
isn’t that the room in which gentlemen can’t fight
pretendous
May 30, 2011 at 1:17 am
i think the points you raise about “white” ethnicity is right on. in a class i took on race, class and gender in education, we spent a day discussing “whitness” and its effect on minority students. however, this at times devolved into just bashing on “white people” in general. i had 2 problems with this:
1) though “whiteness” does exist to some extent, the very people who criticize the concept should also recognize that even among “white people” there are great varieties of experience. is being of russian origin the same as being of italian or irish origin? absolutely not.
2) in some contexts “whiteness” works out differently. for example, if you grew up in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area, as I did, and attended a “diverse” school which was actually just majority Asian-American (Monta Vista High School in Cupertino, CA, which is about 60-70% Asian-American now), whiteness has a totally different meaning. in areas with high minority populations, where “minorities” are sometimes the “majority,” whitness plays out differently.
all this plays out in the knee-jerk reactions to the calls of some Caucasian students for a “white” or “European-American club.” students of minority backgrounds and political liberals/progressives in general view this as a slippery slope to nazism. there is a nugget of truth to that in some cases, especially when people start talking about “white” or “american” pride. on the other hand, as an Asian-American I see lots of nativist and some nationalistic tendencies within ethnic organizations. i don’t see this kind of group behavior within minority ethnic organizations as being any more positive than similar behavior from a “white” or “european” ethnic organization.
Andrew
May 31, 2011 at 3:47 pm
[...] The War Room by Bryan Malessa [...]
books in review: 2010-2011 « orgtheory.net
August 18, 2011 at 3:47 am
tornado mos def
fema
December 12, 2011 at 4:12 pm