Faculty Books: Winter 2021

By Jennifer Latson

Memorial
Bryan Washington
Riverhead Books, 2020

At 27, Bryan Washington has been called a lit world wunderkind. His debut short story collection, “Lot,” came out in 2019 to rave reviews and was included on two highly esteemed lists of the year’s top books: The New York Times Book Review and Barack Obama’s “Favorite Books of the Year.” He’s also the first scholar-in-residence for racial justice at Rice, where he teaches creative writing, including a course titled Writing Black Lives. He recently worked with Rice’s Center for African and African American Studies as it launched a new undergraduate minor and graduate certificate, and he’s working with Rice’s Task Force on Slavery, Segregation and Racial Injustice to create campus events focused on racial justice.

His new novel, “Memorial,” is already a bestseller; it was optioned for TV before it even hit bookshelves. Washington has described it as a “gay slacker dramedy” — but it’s much more than that. Among other things, it’s also an adroit portrait of life in Houston and an incisive commentary on race in America. The novel follows Benson, a Black daycare teacher who is ambivalent about children, and his boyfriend, Mike, a Japanese American chef at a Mexican restaurant, as their relationships with each other and with their families are tested.

Benson and Mike live in Houston’s historically Black Third Ward, where Benson notes the neighborhood’s gentrification in the form of “pockets of rich kids playing at poverty.” “The Black folks who’ve lived here for decades let them do it, happy for the scientific fact that white kids keep the cops away,” Benson observes wryly.

We still go out and about only to find ourselves misidentified, owing to an administrative error in an office somewhere, and we might be shot and killed for that. We still go for walks in the neighborhood, and we might be shot and killed for that. We still take naps at home, and we might be shot and killed for that. We can be killed for any of these things — or anything else, really — with total impunity for the killers.”

Washington is writing what he knows; he used to live in the Third Ward. So did George Floyd, the Black man who was killed by police in Minneapolis last May, sparking nationwide protests against systemic racism and police violence. Washington wrote about one for The New Yorker — a march for justice in Houston that he joined with Floyd’s family. “The diversity of the marchers can’t be overstated: from the midst of the crowd, it was easy to see why Houston is routinely referred to as the most diverse city in the country,” Washington writes.

That doesn’t make it the most tolerant, however, or the safest. In another essay for The New Yorker, Washington wrote about his own experience as a Black man living in Houston: “We have to go about our lives; at the same time, there is this thing right here, which is to say everywhere in this country, that might end it at any time. … We still go out and about only to find ourselves misidentified, owing to an administrative error in an office somewhere, and we might be shot and killed for that. We still go for walks in the neighborhood, and we might be shot and killed for that. We still take naps at home, and we might be shot and killed for that. We can be killed for any of these things — or anything else, really — with total impunity for the killers.”

Why Science and Faith Need Each Other
Eight Shared Values That Move Us Beyond Fear
Elaine Howard Ecklund
Brazos Press, 2020

At a time when America is more polarized than ever before, Elaine Howard Ecklund’s new book seeks to build a bridge between two communities that seemingly occupy opposite ends of a spectrum: scientists and people of faith. Ecklund, a sociology professor at Rice, argues that these groups have more in common than they might realize.

The book documents the values both groups hold dear, including curiosity, creativity, doubt, humility, healing, awe, gratitude and “shalom,” which Ecklund describes as “the peace, harmony, well-being and prosperity that result from the flourishing of all creation.”

“Why Science and Faith Need Each Other” is rooted in Ecklund’s years of social science research and more than 1,200 interviews with Christians and scientists who’ve shared their experiences of integrating science and faith. The book documents the values both groups hold dear, including curiosity, creativity, doubt, humility, healing, awe, gratitude and “shalom,” which Ecklund describes as “the peace, harmony, well-being and prosperity that result from the flourishing of all creation.” Weaving in anecdotes from her own life, Ecklund illustrates how fear can masquerade as anger and create groundless conflict that could be mitigated by understanding. It’s a lesson that applies to countless other groups whose irrational fear of each other has transformed into hostility.

Teams That Work
The Seven Drivers of Team Effectiveness
Scott Tannenbaum and Eduardo Salas
Oxford University Press, 2021

Working together as a team can be a struggle in the best of times — and the COVID-19 pandemic has introduced a whole new set of challenges. In “Teams That Work,” Rice psychology professor Eduardo Salas and Scott Tannenbaum, president of the Group for Organizational Effectiveness, tap a growing body of academic research on effective teamwork and distill it into practical advice for team leaders and team members alike.

Using examples that span a variety of industries — from the corporate world to sports, the military and even NASA, where they’ve conducted research to help assemble crews who will be good teammates on a long space mission — Salas and Tannenbaum debunk myths about teamwork and offer evidence-based insights into how teams work best. As they point out, the stakes are high for employees and managers, since teamwork is becoming more pervasive as organizations become flatter with fewer layers of management. And teams that are unable to overcome adversity, that burn out their team members, or that lack the vitality to adapt and innovate can do real harm to the individuals who serve on them and the organizations who rely on them.

The Latin American Ecocultural Reader
Edited by Jennifer French and Gisela Heffes
Northwestern University Press, 2021

If you’re not familiar with ecocriticism, now is the time to learn more about it, say Gisela Heffes, an associate professor of Latin American literature and culture at Rice, and Jennifer French, a Spanish professor at Williams College.

The study of the relationship between literature, culture and the environment, ecocriticism is closely connected to the environmental justice movement, which “affirms the right of all persons to share equally the benefits of a healthy environment,” Heffes and French write in “The Latin American Ecocultural Reader.” And that’s an especially crucial mission right now. “As we write these words, the news reports are filled each week with stories of floods, droughts, hurricanes, pandemic and wildfires, all triggered or exacerbated by the effects of anthropogenic climate change,” they observe in the introduction to the book, an anthology of texts about the natural world from Latin America.