Why We Swim By Miriam R. Kramer I was immediately attracted to the title of Bonnie Tsui’s charming new book, Why We Swim. In the summer, we have more chances to swim on vacation than during the rest of the year, unless we regularly swim laps or do water aerobics at a local pool. Tsui’s memories echo my own, and her research about swimming combines with her contemplation of activity that can raise our adrenaline because of its dangers or put us in a meditative state because of its rhythmic nature. As Tsui notes, swimming is the second favorite casual exercise after walking. Swimming seems simple on the face of it: get in the water, pick up your feet, and move forward, sideways, or backward, but it is many things to many people. It can be an act of daring. When she swims in the cold deep waters of the San Francisco Bay as part of a club, she joins others who prove to themselves that they can brave a situation in which they are not the apex of the food chain. She finally ditches her wet suit so she can experience a freezing swim in which she starts to feel intensely alive, only to truly experience the dangers from the cold after she gets out of the water. Although swimming can be a solitary activity, she experiences both her own solitude and the camaraderie of her club. It is one of the few activities where you can be alone and together at the same time. Her views of the water are more philosophical than scientific, which suited my tastes. A large, elegant swimming pool belonging to one of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces in Baghdad ironically became an egalitarian place where everyone from various Embassy staff members to migrant workers…
By Miriam R. Kramer American Dirt Recently Oprah Winfrey and Barnes & Noble Bookstores selected the book American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins, a novel about migrants trying to make their way to a new life in the United States, as a timely choice for their respective book clubs. In doing so they unwittingly made a controversial choice. Many Latinx writers protested the pick, with several accusing the white writer of spreading stereotypes about Mexicans and other Central Americans while attempting to write a story that was not hers to write. As pundits and other cultural figures argued about the story, Cummins’ book tour was canceled because of threats of violence. This tumult raised the book’s profile but also obscured what she wrote: a profound and moving work about maternal love, human resilience, and the evil and kindness that emerge during the worst of human circumstances. Her story about migrants searching for the best among terrible choices gives names, faces, and humanity to the brown hordes clamoring for a piece of the North American dream at the border to el norte. American Dirt sprints off the starting line as a middle-class Mexican mother, Lydia, and her son, Luca, hide in a bathroom when bullets start flying at a family birthday party in Acapulco. Emerging to find their extended family killed, along with their husband and father, Sebastián, Lydia finds a note pinned to her husband. It says “My whole family is dead because of me.” As a journalist writing about the cartels, Sebastián has penned a locally published profile of local kingpin Javier Crespo Fuentes, known as La Lechuza (The Owl), the head of the cartel Los Jardineros. Before knowing who he was, Lydia had befriended La Lechuza at the bookstore she owns, growing close to him because of their…