... Gladwell and I ...

... the story's been told so often I take it as truth, part of my personal mythology, repetetive support for one of my earliest memories ... indeed, I can see the scenario now without closing my eyes ... being led through the front entrance of the public library on Tom Redcam Drive in Kingston, Jamaica, not long after my fifth birthday, by a purposeful thirty-something mother, isn't the sort of life-experience you'd expect to be emblazoned on the brain, but that day caught us on a determined mission ...

... before I had a passport, or a driver's license to guarantee my adult freedoms, I first had to get a library card, a ticket to a world of possibility and a gateway to an unending avenue of education and reading for pleasure ... for years all was so, until bookishness yielded sway to relatively sexy tele-news and glossy periodicals ...

... my book-reading love affair eventually took a hiatus but the die was cast, I was hooked on words ... the likes of War And Peace remain unfinished but National Geographic, The Economist and TIME subscriptions were faithfully renewed ... dailies were devoured, specialty-mags mined for target info, while Mad honed sarcasm and satire ... Shakespeare, Chaucer, Steinbeck and Miller, sounding like a law firm, were covered academically but my own reading stream was fed by populist tributaries ...

... eventually the book bug bit back, coming full-circle, and again Mama featured in da mix ... on a recent visit she hit me with the question, "Have you read any of Malcolm Gladwell's books?"...

... this, it turned out, was less of a query than a recommendation, to which I wasn't unreceptive, having been exposed to the author via publishing blitzes illuminating his bestseller celebrity, and, I had previously taken note of his pre-eminent New Yorker byline ... plus, knowing what he looked like, I felt a quasi-cosmic kinship not entirely unrelated to politics of hair and heritage ...















... so, God bless 'er, Mom marches me to the nearest bookstore in a manner reminiscent of our library visit in an earlier age ... by the time we exit she has gifted me The Tipping Point, Blink and the fascinating Outliers, Gladwellian pop-philosophy tomes which become my proper introduction to this modern thinker who, like me, has a preternatural penchant for verbiage, and proto-filial connections to Jamaica, Britain and Canada ...

... at this point she sweetens the pot with archival information dating from beyond her own childhood into the days of her father, my grandfather, the late Rhamos Sutherland Taylor ...

... "Teacher Taylor," as he was respectfully known, was a formidable man by nature ... an educator, and one of a legion of unsung nation-builders who, by discipline, tenacity and sense of self, embodied the fortitude of Jamaican identity leading up to and beyond 1962's independence from British colonial rule ...

... a man of average height ... "Saddie"(derived from Sutherland) to his inner-circle, possessed a crisp countenance, garrulous laugh and a passion for tall glasses of ice-water and sweet mangoes ... because of him I learned to peel an orange the skillful way, in one unbroken, coiled peel ... he had quite the insatiable predilection for citrus and fetching fruit was deemed to be one of my primary duties as eldest grandchild ...

... but, more pertinent to this anecdote than his Ortanique habit, is the fact that one of his closest friends and associates was a man I know only by the surname Nation ... fast friends since their days as batchmates at Mico College, Taylor and Nation were cut from similar country-cloth ... Mico, today a University, is a respected teacher-training facility established in 1836, roughly coinciding with the official end of African enslavement in Jamaica ... it survives as the oldest institution of its type in the Western Hemisphere ... nuff tradition, in other words ...














... such tradition is layered with inter-generational markers ... Taylor's pride, my mother Ivy, is one of the first daughters of an Old Miconian to have actually taught there too, a significant gender breakthrough at the time ... one of Nation's twin daughters, Joyce, Malcolm Gladwell's mother, is herself an insightful author, a key strand of her famous son's poly-cultural chromosomal psychology, and his own understanding of it ...

... like their fathers before them, these "girls" are contemporaries from adjacent rural towns ...

... they continue to parlay paternal impetus into lifelong contributions to community and offspring, with strong faith being a common, sustaining thread ... in fact, the other Nation twin, actually named Faith, in her capacity as board member of the Bible Society of The West Indies, is at least partially responsible for a Jamaican patois, audio re-enactment of popular Bible stories falling into my hands ...

... appropriately titled "A Who Run Tings?" in the vernacular, complete with reggae instrumental background music, this work came to me via Miss Ivy's social network ... on listening, it's not difficult to imagine looks of satisfied ('Saddie-sfied?') mirth on the faces of Taylor and Nation, runnin' tings in repose from inside the Pearly Gates ...

... as they gaze upon the vibrant extensions of their bloodlines ...

... Freedom for the reader ...

... the reader made short work of last year's hot bestseller and suspects, in the imaginative way the mind operates when the clever-cortex is activated, that if Jonathan Franzen had been born say, a beaver, his talents would have led him to build a dam colossal enough to re-route the Potomac ...

... environmentalists would make pilgrimages for academic observation and satellites would transmit infra-red imagery for news-channel telestrators ... Jonny Beaver would trigger an eco-event and media sensation simultaneously, cause celebre for The Nature of Things ... instead, God gave Franzen a pen, and judging by the protracted detailing in this latest novel Freedom, more than one replacement ink cartridge was bestowed on him too ...

... of course, the reader concedes, in this iPad and keyboard era it's nigh unto impossible to find ink cartridges if you need to replace them, but he'll keep the pen and ink metaphor to sub for laptop and RAM ... suffice it to say, the result is a comprehensive work of modern fiction, prolific with vivid characters who are all fascinating in their ordinariness and riveting in their familiarity ... an exercise in guiltless literary voyeurism, difficult to put down or look away from ...

... it proves less difficult to remove the cottage-country slip cover to proclaim FREEDOM in bold silver letters from the book spine ... "when is Martin Luther King Day?", comes the overheard whisper from somewhere over there as the hefty, black hardcover holds steady at optimum distance from the reader's bespectacled face ... a slight torque on the little word "is" implying something more than the question ordinarily might convey ...

... in fact, there's no call to mention MLK ... the reader's expectation of a civil rights angle, given the connotative associations of the title with themes of struggle, proves way off the mark ... but, there is civic passion in the prose and redemptive realism to the relevant narrative, held aloft by contemporary dialogue, believable character development and honest airing-out of other peoples personal struggles ...

... Walter and Patty Berglund and Richard Katz are not perfect people, in the same way the reader is not, nor you, or you ... or Bono or Princess Di, or Jonathan Franzen ... but the yin and the yang of each fictional life is laid out here across the long chapters, illuminating individual and intertwined storylines to support the contemplative hypothesis that no-one is all good or all bad except Bernie Madoff (who, in fairness, isn't mentioned either) ...

... Franzen completes the pastiche by tracing both male and female psychologies across generational lines - what a concept! - to follow relationships between adults and their offspring, evolutions within friendships and marriages and to see how the dance of life can wheel and turn from waltz to rhumba to tap to freestyle and back, over time, without missing a beat ...

... in the 1972 Jamaican film The Harder They Come there's an aha moment for Jimmy Cliff's character, Ivan, wherein he casually coos "revolutionary to raass" when he recognizes the potency of his exploits ... and, while "revolutionary" is the kind of broad stroke Franzen eschews in his writing, and avoids in his self-promotion, this is exactly how I imagine he's feeling these days as a Katzian figure on the cover of Rolling Stone! ... well okay, it's a TIME magazine cover, but that gives him rockstar balls to dangle like Stephen King or Norman Mailer ... or Richard Katz ...

... "aw shit", the reader mumbles, noticing the reference to his own thoughts in a too-long sentence in the preceding paragraph, effectively outing himself as this writer ... then again, like some twists-of-fortune in the novel, this is forgivably predictable ... "so sue me," but don't judge me for bitin' the guy's style, it's intended to flatter, and I'll take the largesse just in case the Freedom Road to Oprah's attention is (no torque applied) paved with Middle American philosophy, soft sell and third-person syntax ...

... "just read it"... she said ...

... "I'm not sure how this one passed you by" ... ... I think those were the words used when she lent me the book ... adding a touch of sheepish culpability to my receipt of her kindness ... "but," she ventured to add with a sage tone in her voice, "it doesn't really matter much when you read it ... just read it" ...

... of course I devoured it right away and have been keener to life's de facto ironies ever since ...

... Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho's 1988 mystic novella The Alchemist will do that to you if you've ever dreamed or dreamed of dreaming ...

... either you have or you want to ... and many of us can find some liberation in our dreams ...

... additionally, embedded in this tale-of-journey is profound reflection on the road travelled ... the factors that can affect decision making, direction of conscious energies toward what the heart desires and the satisfaction of soul ...

... if we accept that matter can neither be created nor destroyed then we flirt with the concept of alchemy, or change, in nature ... when we further expand to see alchemy at play in changes of circumstance ... even geographical scenery ... we realise alchemy in reality is not about medieval potions and the turning-of-lead-into-gold conjuring of hooded magii, but simply about ...

... understanding ...

..." just read it," she said, which I repeat and endorse ... and, I suggest you'll want to do so before the long-anticipated release of the movie version by Laurence Fishburne ... now expected next year ...

... "UNBURNABLE" ... a reader appreciation ...

... in two weeks it was over, I had read the whole novel ... not just the words, I followed the flow and felt the flesh between the fantasy, experiencing the author's efforts ... it had all been laid out before me, vivid characters with ancestral contexts that raised them above the realm of the merely well drawn ... the multi-generational subject matter is rooted as firmly in the layers of the past as it is in the 21st century here-and-now ...

... the book, set in Dominica and Washington D.C., is a first effort from Antigua's Marie-Elena John ... titled "Unburnable" it has been in print three or four years now ... recommendations came from more than one person ...

... written reviews I've seen are overwhelmingly positive ... were I to write one it would heavily skew towards the favourable too ... some testimonial anecdotes have referred to the plethora of characters and intersecting timelines as requiring back-referencing during the read ... this was not my experience ... I, famous for sometimes starting but not finishing a book, was compelled by the artful storytelling and entertained from beginning to very end, even when, at times, I was able to anticipate a plot turn ...

... now, books are great ... reading is good ... many of us actually combine the two on occasion and actually ... read books ... I was a keen reader as a boy ... historical chronology has me reading at three years old (!!), and indeed, one of the earliest memories I have is being taken to join the public library on Tom Redcam Drive in Kingston ... (Thomas MacDermot was a Jamaican writer from the turn of the previous century who encouraged local readers with local fare ... he published under the mischievously inverted surname pseudonym Tom Redcam) ...

... at a certain point in my life, probably when other things started to make demands on my time ... sports, girls, academic nonchalance ... it became acceptable to my set of personal standards to read fewer books .... I favoured newspapers and the picture-heavy, sexier kid-sister of the book known as the magazine ... the competition for my reduced time-allotted-for-reading now has to take the blogosphere into account as well ...

... my reading habits weren't pre-figured ... I was one of those students who enjoyed English Lit., Shakespeare, Chaucer, the entire axis of de rigeur Anglo-American literati ... Hemmingway, Hardy, Steinbeck ... who can forget To Kill A Mockingbird or The Crucible ... characters like Holden Caulfield ... and Dickens, it's a long list ... in my time we were also taught broad historical and geopolitical identifiers of our diversity but academic acceptance for homegrown authors and artists, barring a select few, was still in the process of being won ...

... true too is the admission that adolescent education of the libidinous sort found in Lady Chatterley's Lover, dog-eared, passed-around copies of Fanny Hill, or passages in parentally ratified blockbusters-of-the-day like Portnoy's Complaint, Valley Of The Dolls or Fear Of Flying, lured me away from Tolstoy and Tolkien ... in my imagination gulag and hobbit could never compete with gonad and hormone ....

... thankfully today there's a vibrant literary scene encompassing the whole "carry-beyond" and it's scattered bloodlines ... poets, novelists, playwrights, biographers and bloggers abound ... the beauty of a work like "Unburnable" is the seamless representation of so many factors in this reader's socialization ... Caribbean cultural themes replete with indigenous, African, European exposition, contemporized by concurrent doses of Diaspora featuring media-savvy lifestyles and BB texting ...

... we of the islands are known to be a matriarch driven social engine, and appropriately, the female characters in this book reflect a variety of strengths and authorities ... all have innate understanding of yoni power and how it can make the world ... and the men within it ... turn ... or burn ...