Blessings and Disasters
A Story of Alabama
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2.0 • 1 Rating
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
From a New Yorker staff writer and PEN award winner, a blend of memoir, history, and reportage on one of the most complex and least understood states in America.
“In Alabama, we exist at the border of blessing and disaster….”
Alexis Okeowo grew up in Montgomery—the former seat of the Confederacy—as the daughter of Nigerian immigrants. Here, she weaves her family’s story with Alabama’s, defying stereotypes about her endlessly complex, often-pigeonholed home state. She immerses us in a landscape dominated today not by cotton fields but by Amazon warehouses, encountering high-powered Christian business leaders lobbying for tribal sovereignty and small-town women coming out against conservative politics. Okeowo shows how people can love their home while still acknowledging its sins.
In this perspective-shifting work that is both an intimate memoir and a journalistic triumph, Okeowo investigates her life, other Alabamians’ lives, and the state’s lesser-known histories to examine why Alabama has been the stage for the most extreme results of the American experiment.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Alabama is often misunderstood by outsiders, and author Alexis Okeowo offers a singular view of her home state in this intelligent, well-researched volume. Part autobiography, part historical essay, and part sociological study, Blessings and Disasters is the work of a woman who grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, as the daughter of Nigeria-born academics. Her stories of a people with a fuzzy view of history and a suspicion of change come from the point of view of a native who is also outside the culture. While the book deals bluntly with issues of racism, sexism, and class division, Okeowo also reveals a genuine affection for the friendliness and compassion of Alabamians, even as she disagrees with them. There’s a warmth and wit to balance the justifiable outrage.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New Yorker staff writer Okeowo (A Moonless, Starless Sky) offers a wide-ranging and nuanced account of her home state. Her motivation, she writes, is partly that, upon telling acquaintances she's from Alabama, she's often met with a "dumbstruck" response of "What was that like?" Surveying Alabama history, from slavery and Indian removal through the Confederacy's defeat to the civil rights movement and mass incarceration, she notes that it's a "land that has been turned over so many times, changed character depending on the circumstances, been in dispute as to who owns it." According to Okeowo, an unresolved, backward-looking, and still tense atmosphere of ownership-in-dispute characterizes the modern state. During her interviews with a host of figures, from a white woman who endured childhood sexual abuse to a Black survivor of a Klan "night rider" attack, she explores and at times attempts to bridge this divide (recounting a discussion with a white historian who argues that the Confederacy can't be judged by "today's moral standards," Okeowo, the daughter of Nigerian immigrants, highlights that he is open to her disagreement on that claim, and that overall the conversation is productive). To do so, she draws on an ingrained neighborliness that, as a sort of counterpoint, also permeates her depiction of Alabamans. Probing and sumptuously written, this makes for an entrancingly ground-level and empathetic view of Alabama's past and present.
