You Want to Celebrate Martin Luther King Junior's Work

Love “Uncle Buck” or are thinking about finally deactivating your Facebook account

Hi friends,

I hope your week is off to a good start.

I spent my snowy, sleety weekend jumping on the Yellowjackets bandwagon. (Yes — I know I’m late to the party. I was worried it would be too gory for me. It goes right up to the line.)

For the uninitiated, Yellowjackets, a Showtime show, follows a girls’ soccer team stranded in the Canadian wilderness for 19 months after a plane crash in the ’90 and the same women in 2021 as they attempt to rebuild their lives. It’s a feminist Lord of the Flies. And, since I’m a sucker for anything exploring complex relationships between women, I’m sure I’ll finish it soon (and will likely have a read-alike in the coming weeks).

In other news, we have two winners of the raffle for a copy of The Third Rainbow Girl and Better Luck Next Time. Congrats to Think Piece of Pie and Nancy Reddy! Nancy has a poetry collection, Pocket Universe, coming out in March, and is the editor of the upcoming The Long Devotion: Poets Writing about Motherhood.

And, now, what to read if…

You Want to Continue to Reflect on Martin Luther King Junior’s Legacy

The Three Mothers by Anna Malaika Tubbs

In The Three Mothers, sociologist Anna Malaika Tubbs documents how the mothers of Martin Luther King Jr, James Baldwin and Malcolm X influenced their sons’ work, and in turn, the country. King was particularly close with his mother, Alberta. They exchanged letters regularly after he went to college — and he looked to her for guidance. She instilled in him a strong sense of justice and dignity.

As King’s older sister, Christine King Farris, wrote in her memoir, “Every now and then, I have to chuckle as I realize there are people who actually believe ML just appeared. They think he simply happened, that he appeared fully formed, without context, ready to change the world.”

Tubbs’ book offers a counter to that idea, showing how Berdis Baldwin encouraged her son, James, to write, against the wishes of her abusive father and Louise Little taught Malcolm about the long tradition of activism in his family, as well as chronicling the Kings’ relationship. She also uses their experiences to help illustrate what life was like for Black women living under Jim Crow. In doing so, Tubbs corrects a historical record that has long ignored these mothers, and Black women more generally. It’s a concise read, less than 300 pages, and well worth it.

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“Uncle Buck” is One of Your Favorite Movies

The Guncle by Steven Rowley

As a John Hughes super-fan, I have seen “Uncle Buck,” the movie where a deadbeat John Candy is forced to care for his nieces and nephews, at least a dozen times. I’m actually giggling at my computer right now thinking about it. Steven Rowley’s The Guncle takes a similar plot and gives it the same heart and humor as the film classic. (Yes. I said classic.)

In The Guncle, Patrick, a gay one-time sitcom star, takes custody of his niece and nephew for the summer after their mother dies and their father enters rehab. The children, adorably, call him GUP (Gay Uncle Patrick) and Patrick takes on the title — and the kids — begrudgingly. Since the death of his partner years earlier, Patrick has built an isolated existence in Palm Springs, cutting off contact with all his former friends and refusing to take on more acting jobs. Over the book’s pages, the kids and Patrick work through their grief together, finding ways to build a life after devastation.

I had been meaning to read The Guncle for a while and knocked it to the top of my list after Julia Claiborne Johnson recommended it in our interview. I’m so glad I did. It’s warm and funny, and while the plot maybe predictable, I found the journey completely enjoyable. The Guncle has some laugh-out-loud scenes, like when Patrick tries to explain the concept of brunch to the kids, and moments that caused me to tear up. It’s the rare book that really made me laugh and cry.

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You’re Thinking About Deleting Your Facebook Account

An Ugly Truth by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang

To have a Facebook account in 2022 is to be constantly considering if it it’s time to deactivate it. Or at least it is for me. The latest accusation is that the social media giant illegal collaborated with Google to fix prices for internet advertising.

In An Ugly Truth, veteran journalists Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang carefully dismantle the argument that the company has simply lost its way and instead claim that the issues it has faced over the last five years — inciting violence in Myanmar, allowing huge amounts of misinformation to be spread by Russian oligarchs and mishandling users’ private data — were inevitable, given the company’s structure and goals. To report the book, Frankel and Kang conducted more than 1000 hours of interviews with roughly 400 people, including Facebook executives and their family and friends, investors, consultants and activists who have been raising the alarm about the company for years. It’s a testament to their skills that these Pulitzer finalists  whittled all that information into a short, readable volume.

I’m not sure obsessive Facebook watchers will find a lot new scoops in this book. As a New York Times review put it, “‘An Ugly Truth’ provides the kind of satisfaction you might get if you hired a private investigator to track a cheating spouse: It confirms your worst suspicions and then gives you all the dates and details you need to cut through the company’s spin.” But where it succeeds is tying together all the disparate threads, showing how scandal is built into Facebook’s DNA.

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That’s it for me this week! I’ll be back next week with recommendations and a Q&A I’m extra excited about.

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What to Read If is a free weekly book recommendation newsletter. Need a rec? Want to gush about a book? Reply to this email, leave a comment or find me on Twitter @elizabethheld.

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