I wrote it from a place of empathy and trying to understand my parents as human beings rather than as just my parents. I’m hoping that translates to readers. This political discourse around immigration is so divisive, and I’m hoping that this story and where it was made from will remind people just to empathize. They’re human beings just like everybody else and I hope that will cut through and remind people that these are human beings we’re talking about, not “others.What do you think? What historical events are tied to your own family history, and did any of these events influence your family to immigrate to another country? How and when did you first learn of your family's experience? What factors contributed to Bui's parents' decision to leave Vietnam after the war ended? What would you have done in their place? What is the difference between leaving a country voluntarily and being forced to leave your homeland? What are some positive and negative effects of such a dislocation? Bui's cousins in Indiana, who had been in the United States longer than Bui's family, criticize her behavior, saying, "Don't be such a REFUGEE!" What do they mean by this comment? When you hear the word "refugee," what do you think of? How do perceptions of refugees affect their experience? Consider the national and international stories about refugees in the news today. How do they compare to the Buis' experience? What is the difference between being born into a family and creating one? What is the difference between proximity to family and closeness to family? How did Bui's parents' experience affect their relationship with their children? What are Bui's concerns for her own child? What do think Bui is saying with her book's title, The Best We Could Do? Bui says in her book that she was seeking "an origin story . . . that will set everything right?" Does she find what she was looking for, or something else? How do you feel the graphic novel format Bui chose to tell her story affected its message and the power of its story?
What I love most about Ina is that she teaches me about fostering a strong sense of self and self-confidence. She teaches me about being at ease in my body. From all appearances, she is entirely at ease with herself. She is ambitious and knows she is excellent at what she does and never apologizes for it. She teaches me that a woman can be plump and pleasant and absolutely in love with food. She gives me permission to love food. She gives me permission to acknowledge my hungers and to try and satisfy them in healthy ways. She gives me permission to buy the "good" ingredients she is so fond of recommending so that I might make good food for myself and the people for whom I enjoy cooking. She gives me permission to embrace my ambition and believe in myself. In the case of Barefoot Contessa, a cooking show is far more than just a cooking show.That's quite a recommendation.
The story of my body is not a story of triumph. This is not a weight-loss memoir. There will be no picture of a thin version of me, my slender body emblazoned across this book's cover, with me standing in one leg of my former, fatter self's jeans. This is not a book that will offer motivation. I don't have any powerful insight into what it takes to overcome an unruly body and unruly appetites.This is not an easy book to read. Gay understands this:
Writing this book is the most difficult thing I've ever done. To lay myself so vulnerable has not been an easy thing. To face myself and what living in my body has been like has not been an easy thing, but I wrote this book because it felt necessary. In writing this memoir of my body, in telling you these truths about my body, I am sharing my truth and mine alone. I understand if that truth is not something you want to hear. The truth makes me uncomfortable too.It feels like a necessary book, not just for Gay, but for her readers. Through reading Gay's story, we can understand the world from a point of view, from a very real and lived--and uncomfortable--perspective, in a way we might not otherwise have done.
This is as close a story to good and evil as I ever came across. I spent so much time with the evil that it was very disconcerting. But I really was determined not to just catalog the victims. I wanted to find the descendants who could help try to give the dead some voice. . . . One of the things that I wanted to try to show, hopefully, in the book by telling it through three different points of view--the Osage and Mollie Burkhart, Tom White and then me in the present--was to show the process of the accumulation of knowledge that only unfolds over time. Each person, as they live through history, can't see it all. There's a tendency when we write history to do it with the power of hindsight and then assume almost god-like knowledge that nobody living through history has. . . . I discovered there is a limited trail of evidence; there are gaps. I had always kind of assumed that history was kind of a horror that you know. And this was a story that left me profoundly with a sensation of maybe the real horror is what we don't know.What do you think? We are familiar with many historical American crimes and criminals from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from movies, books, and television shows. Why do you think the story of the Osage murders hasn't received similar attention? How does the story Grann tells differ from the traditional kinds of stories of the American West we are used to hearing and seeing? Killers of the Flower Moon combines the fast pace of a true crime murder mystery with the scope and detail of narrative history and investigative journalism. How does Grann integrate these different aspects of the book and take it beyond a voyeuristic true crime story? What was your first impression of William Hale? Grann introduces him with an allusion to one of William Faulkner's most complicated characters from the novel Absalom, Absalom!: "Like a real-life version of Faulkner's Thomas Sutpen, he seemed to have come out of nowhere--a man with no known past." What does this allusion tell us about Hale? About American history and culture? What qualities does Hale share with this fictional character and with people who achieve power and influence today? What about Hoover? What kind of person was he? How did the bureaucracy he created help to conceal the extent and true horror of the Osage murders? In contrast, describe Tom White. How does he differ from so many other people described in the book? What do the contemporary media reports on the wealth of the Osage and the investigations into the murders reflect about white perceptions of Native Americans? How did they influence the way the murders were treated by law enforcement? Are there historical examples of racial prejudice and injustice that parallel those described in Killers of the Flower Moon? How about recent examples? Has anything changed about the approach taken by media and law enforcement? About the attitudes expressed by the white community in the face of racial, religious, or other discrimination? In what ways have things remained the same?
