(no subject)

[conuly]

Climate Change Is of Growing Personal Concern to U.S. Hispanics, Poll Finds

How big food brands are boosting profits by targeting the poor

Surviving the Nazis, Only to Be Jailed by America

To End Solitary Confinement, Rikers Steps Out Of The Box

Niger army repels fresh Boko Haram attack on border town

Scientists Invent a New Steel as Strong as Titanium

I’m an Anti-Braker

Bitter economic winds hasten oil industry’s retreat from the North Sea

It had never been verified before: unlike other biopolymers, RNA, the long strand that is 'cousin' to DNA, tends not to form knots.

Black girls in New York schools were expelled 53 times more than white girls: Researchers

‘Rubber Hand’ Illusion May Build Understanding of Sensory Processing In Autistic Brains

Somalia criticises US bank's move to halt remittances

"I find it extremely problematic to suggest that a library doesn't need a book--award-winner or not--that features a minority protagonist on the basis that there aren't many readers of that minority who use the library. To me, that suggests both a bias on the part of selectors as well as a lack of trust in the readers we serve."

The forgotten children: Investigating sex-trafficking in America

Haitians demand lower fuel prices in mass protests

The powerful cheat for themselves, the powerless cheat for others

Artificial Photosynthesis for Energy Takes a Step Forward

The Muslims of Early America

UK-US surveillance regime was unlawful ‘for seven years’

Fear of Gitmo prisoners returning to 'terror' activities after release unfounded, says top defense official

The Shame of America’s Family Detention Camps

Buried in one of Isaac Newton's college notebooks is a page on which he fairly accurately theorizes on the process of transpiration in plants, two centuries before the concept was elucidated.

Nigeria's Boko Haram 'kidnaps 20' in Cameroon bus hijacking

Wall Street Pays Bankers to Work in Government and It Doesn't Want Anyone to Know

Lebanon army holds the line as ISIL inches closer to border towns

Comments

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

I have to agree with the commenter who said “If you want to champion diversity in a place where people are resistant, sell the story, not the character's color or orientation.” Brown Girl Dreaming may be a great book (I haven't read it,) but it's got a lousy title.

*shrugs* I was a white girl, and I'd have passed over a book titled White Girl Dreaming without a second glance. I wouldn't expect either white boys, or brown girls or boys, to do any differently. The title Brown Girl Dreaming makes it sound like the kind of book white-bread teachers read aloud to their all-white classes in the name of 'diversity', which is a genre all we children of white-bread suburbia learned to loathe. It doesn't sound like the authentic experience of an authentic brown girl - more like like Go Ask Alice, which was a sanctimonious fake (http://www.snopes.com/language/literary/askalice.asp) - and I'll bet a lot of the brown girls pass over it for that reason to.

Not counting The Jungle Books, the first book with a brown protagonist that I read was The Lilies of the Field (http://www.amazon.com/The-Lilies-Field-William-Barrett/dp/0446315001), when I was in fourth grade. Neither the culture nor any of the characters were like my own experience at all, but it didn't matter; it's an amazing story. (Mowgli is definitely brown, but the wolves are his people, and the only representatives of brown-people culture are the villagers, so his brownness doesn't really count: he's just wolf-colored.)

[conuly]

If the fact that Brown Girl Dreaming is written in poems isn't enough to turn kids off, I doubt the title will do a worse job. (Not a fan of the current fashion for award winning poetry novels. Just... not.)

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Real poems that rhyme and scan, or what Robert Frost called 'cherished prose'?

... it does sound 'politically-correct' in that mealy-mouthed newage "everyone's a special snowflake' way. I liked poetry just fine when I was a kid, but I couldn't abide sanctimonious glurge.

[conuly]

That, I don't know. I like my poetry books to be poetry books, not novels.