Who is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service edited by Michael Lewis
I saw a television interview of editor Michael Lewis about this book, and decided to read it, as my local public library had (surprisingly, for my ruby-red community) just purchased it. Lewis wrote two of the eight essays in the book (as well as the introduction); Geraldine Brooks and Sarah Vowell were two of the other essayists I recognized. Originally, these stories - each about "someone doing an interesting job for the government" - were published in the Opinions section of The Washington Post in 2024.
With Elon Musk's chainsaw approach to cutting government "waste," the early 2025 publication of this book couldn't be more timely. There's a misconception out there that government employees are lazy bureaucrats. Full disclosure - I am a retired government employee, albeit on the state and local (municipal and school district) levels, not federal - and I am damn tired of that stereotype.
As a former university librarian who supervised archives, my favorite essay was Vowell's "The Equalizer," about Pamela Wright of the National Archives (NARA). Formerly Chief Innovation Officer there (she left in December 2024), Wright was behind such programs there as Citizen Archivist, where volunteers transcribe handwritten records to make them searchable online, and add tags (search terms) to photos and other existing online records, and History Hub, a digital reference platform where anyone can submit a query and NARA archivists, other federal staffers and citizen volunteers will chime in with answers, follow-up questions or advice, all free of charge.
Under her leadership, NARA has also partnered on digitization projects with genealogy websites such as FamilySearch and Ancestry, and used OCR (optical character recognition) and AI to create a name index for the 1950 Census release on April 1, 2022, that made it immediately searchable.
I have to wonder how many of the people profiled in this book have lost their jobs or otherwise left federal government employment, thanks to tRump's policies.
Bannock in a Hammock by Maisana Kelly, illustrated by Amiel Sandland
With rhyming text and colorful illustrations, this picture book for preschoolers is about a bread popular with the Inuit and other native peoples of Canada. It ends with a recipe and a glossary of four Inuktitut words used in the book (two names and two nouns). Although they're not Inuktitut words, definitions of char and Klik would also have been helpful. This book would pair well with The Only Way to Make Bread.
Magda Revealed by Ursula Werner
I really enjoyed this novel about the historical Mary Magdalene. Telling her story in her own words after two thousand years (as the prologue and epilogue make clear), Magda (as "everyone who ever loved me called me") is not the prostitute of lore, but a victim of gang rape (by visiting theological students), healed by Yeshua (Jesus).
The main body of the book begins in Magdala, Magda's home, and moves on to Capharnaum (Capernaum) and Jerusalem, as Magda follows Yeshua to his death and resurrection. The last part of the book is about Magda's ministry and what happens to her after Yeshua's time on Earth. The epilogue has a twist that surprised me, but made sense in the context of the whole book.
Magda Revealed reminded me a lot of another novel I read recently, Recycled Virgin by DA Brown, in which Mary, the mother of Jesus, gets reincarnated over and over. That book also presents an alternate interpretation of history from that given in the Bible and religious (especially Catholic) doctrine. It's also similar to Margaret George's Mary, Called Magdalene, although that biographical novel is twice as long, 630 pages to Ursula Werner's 315.
I do wish Werner had included an author's note and discussed the research she did for this book. For example, I was able to figure out that Magda's companions Yohanna (Joanna) and Shoshanna (Susanna) are based on women in Luke 8:1-3. I'd like to know, for example, the inspiration for another female companion, Ilana.
This book has a lot to say about what's going on in the world (and particularly the United States) today. If you're someone who believes everything in the Bible is true, this book is not for you. But if you're even a little bit open-minded (I'm Catholic born-and-bred but now mostly agnostic), give this book a try.
Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler
I read Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower in March, and my name finally came up this month on the holds list for its sequel, Parable of the Talents. It was published in 1998. That was 27 years ago. It's amazing and frightening, the parallels to what is going on in the USA today.
The book picks up the story from Parable of the Sower, five years later in 2032. It's told many years later primarily by Asha Vere (aka Larkin Bankole), daughter of Lauren Olamina, protagonist of Sower, as introductions to entries from Lauren's journals.
In the book, former preacher Andrew Steele Jarret has been elected president under the slogan "make America great again" (a direct quote from the book). His "Christian America" followers set out to cleanse the country of those who aren't of their sect. Lauren and her Earthseed followers have been living a mostly-quiet, successful life at "Acorn," the community they began five years earlier on land owned by Lauren's husband Bankole in northern California, and Lauren and Bankole have a baby daughter they name Larkin. Then one day, Jarret's followers show up, and turn Acorn into a prison camp, taking the young children - including Larkin - away to be raised in so-called "Christian" homes.
I don't want to include any spoilers - suffice to say the treatment Lauren and fellow Acorn residents receive is too evocative of what is going on right now with the ICE immigrant raids. These two books are must-reads for everyone, in my opinion.
In a November 2005 interview (less than four months before her untimely death), Butler described the two books as "what I call cautionary tales: If we keep misbehaving ourselves, ignoring what we've been ignoring, doing what we've been doing to the environment, for instance, here's what we're liable to wind up with."
