I went on the Chicago River Architectural Boat tour this past fall and as they were talking about the buildings, I remembered something about the Stan...moreI went on the Chicago River Architectural Boat tour this past fall and as they were talking about the buildings, I remembered something about the Stanford White murder. It made me realize I didn't know much about the "Trial of the Century," so I wanted to learn more.
Eventually, I read this book as a way to bone up on the story. And, I got it. But, the writing was incredibly over-stylized - to the point of distraction. It really was more of a biography of Evelyn Nesbit than an over-all account of the murder.
Sadly, Uruburu gives our dear Evelyn almost no agency, which seems odd in a biography. Everything that happened, happened TO her. I just don't believe that anyone's life could be so reactive in nature.
SO, I got what I needed from this book, but I wouldn't say I enjoyed the ride.(less)
Man, this book is scary. Basically argues that if a baby doesn't get enough attention, it's too late to make him a scholar by middle school.
The book f...moreMan, this book is scary. Basically argues that if a baby doesn't get enough attention, it's too late to make him a scholar by middle school.
The book follows Geoffrey Canada's first attempt at a middle school, and the results are disastrous. I hope that the HCZ can work, I hope it does work, but I would love to read something that says that smart people can change their circumstances at any point in their lives.
When companies have to make really hard decisions everyday, they create a protocol to take the emotions out of the process and to focus only on value....moreWhen companies have to make really hard decisions everyday, they create a protocol to take the emotions out of the process and to focus only on value. When governments do it, it's called collateral damage. Paul Farmer doesn't believe in protocol OR collateral damage. He believes in curing people of curable diseases, no matter where they live, who they are or how much money they have.
I keep trying to think of a metaphor to describe Farmer's drive. Imagine if your house was on fire and all your favorite things and people were inside of it. Paul Farmer operates on that level every single second of every single day, except his house is the third world and his favorite people are the world's poor. He's happy to have the fire department come with their technologies for fire fighting, but he's also happy to literally throw water on the fire bucket by bucket. He is most at peace when walking 4 hours through Haitian tundra to treat one family with a history of tuberculosis.
If you read this and think oh, this book must be just a tremendous guilt trip for the rest of first world humanity - you're right. But Paul Farmer doesn't care. He thinks guilt is good, it's important. If it makes you question privilege, if it makes you uncomfortable with how little you do to eradicate inequality, if it makes you write a check to Partners in Health, that's just fine with him.
It's hard to separate Tracy Kidder's work from the story itself - Paul Farmer is a fascinating character and the work he's done in places like Haiti, in Russian prisons, in Peru is amazing and most health organizations think the work he has done is impossible to replicate. Treating one person at a time. But by the end of the narrative, you'll have bought into Paul's ideology as well.
I do wonder how much the people he loves and who love him suffer for this mission, but the fact that he thinks it would be selfish to even discuss that makes me understand why Kidder doesn't delve too deeply into that.
Paul is frustrating, brilliant, and has more energy and drive than any other human being I have ever met or read about. The book is worth reading for many reasons - why do the poor suffer? how does the first world continue to turn its back on suffering? You'll cry, you'll laugh, you'll feel guilty and most importantly - this book will make you think.
If you've read my long, rambling critique of Warmth of Other Suns, you'll discover that I didn't think that Wilkerson did a very good job describing J...moreIf you've read my long, rambling critique of Warmth of Other Suns, you'll discover that I didn't think that Wilkerson did a very good job describing Jim Crow's influence in the North.
Rebecca Skloot manages to weave the story of Northern institutional racism into her science history most adeptly. The story she tells, of cell research and the family Henrietta Lacks left behind after her painful death due to cervical cancer, is, well, adept. And it is, well woven. I learned a great deal about cells, DNA, and the ethical quandary of tissue donation (with and without consent). It takes a crazazy turn at the end, as Henrietta's daughter comes closer to the truth of her "mother cells," that I wasn't quite prepared for.
I have only two issues with this book.
1) Her afterward focused completely on the state of tissue donation. As an academic historian, I was told time and time again to look at the big picture: the "so what" that my story was telling. Yes, the so what of tissue donation is a big deal, but so is the fact that poor, Black people are denied health care throughout this country and, more importantly, I think her book argues quite effectively, are often afraid to seek out medical help. I would have liked to see her put some "so what" into that theme at the end.
2) Her science writing gets a bit tedious, and list-y. Paragraphs just list research being done with HeLa cells. Pages and pages of lists. But do more than a laundry list, at least do more than just 10 lists, tell more stories! Or leave them out completely. We get it! These cells are important.
I believe that someone told Isabel Wilkerson that if you were to write an "Epic Story of America's Great Migration," the book would have to be at leas...moreI believe that someone told Isabel Wilkerson that if you were to write an "Epic Story of America's Great Migration," the book would have to be at least 500+ pages. The first 200 pages would have made a great book. The last 300 are incredibly lacking.
It's obvious that Wilkerson fell head over heels in love with the 3 southern migrants that she interviewed and who make up the heart and soul of this book. She spent years with these folk, taking them to dialysis, funerals, back down South to see their humble beginnings. She forgives them their foibles and faults (children out of wedlock, serious gambling addictions, northern strike breaking). And in many ways, the reader will fall for them too. However, in so doing, she becomes as myopic as her elderly subjects when it comes to the second half of their stories.
She does an incredible job in the first half of the book, describing the torment of being a poor black southerner in the Jim Crow south: The fear of merely finding oneself alone on the street with a white person, the degradation of second-class citizenship, the economic inequalities of sharecropping. Readers will instantly see the reasons for fleeing the south, and understand why so many did indeed flee. Wilkerson also does a superb job explaining that simply leaving the untenable situation was in itself an act of resistance against the white southern establishment. This is a key to the story of Migration that often goes unheralded.
However, once her protagonists get to their Northern destination, she stops the careful dismantling of racial discrimination, leaving us with the idea that the North was just as disappointing as the south, but without a sense of the deep issues of Northern racism and inequality. In particular, she never fully addresses how institutionalized racism held back both northern born blacks or southern migrants. She never brings in stories of police brutality, red lining black neighborhoods or the racism built in to so many of the New Deal social programs. Instead, like her protagonists, she merely seems puzzled and discouraged by the new cultures migrants found. In fact, she even goes as far as to say that MLK couldn't find a strong platform for civil rights in the north: but historians and CRM workers have made it abundantly clear that MLK was working for economic equality and against institutions that kept northern blacks from economic and social successes.
And it would be one thing if she merely left it there. But she doesn't. She makes a point over and over again that southern migrants were not the cause of northern cities ills, but that they were more indeed more hard working than northern blacks, more educated and more likely to keep families intact. I believe she goes as far as saying that there were 2 classes of black folk in the north, and those from southern roots were definitely held higher in her own esteem. However, when her three subjects make it to the north, they seem to become witnesses to the world around them, rather than participants. They have no answers to why their neighborhoods have become crack dens and liquor stores and they truly don't understand the riots that occur in their adopted cities throughout the second half of the century - and Wilkerson leaves it at that. I had hoped that she would do some work into repudiating the Moynihan Report, but instead, she implies that the problems of the inner city were caused by northern born blacks not southern migrants, and that's good enough for her.
Now, this is not supposed to be a book about the entire history of race relations in the 20th century, and I can hardly fault Wilkerson for not focusing more on the inner workings of northern cities racist practices. But I can fault her as a journalist for not staying objective on questions of northern and southern blacks. And I will fault her for not realizing that her book could have ended after the migrants she followed made it to the north. While she does a good job of showing how their southern roots were strong until the ends of their lives, for better or for worse, it doesn't take an extra 300 pages to illustrate that. And she does herself such a disservice by creating a fully understandable southern culture and not taking that same keen eye or research into the second half of her story.
So I'm only going to give this book 3 stars. And here's why: While I agree with most everything argued in this book - The rise of agriculture, private...moreSo I'm only going to give this book 3 stars. And here's why: While I agree with most everything argued in this book - The rise of agriculture, private property and capitalism has pushed the concept of the nuclear family into our cultures and our heads as "normal human behavior" but, anthropologically, sociologically, evolutionarily and biologically - there ain't no such thang as normal.
That being said, I find a great deal of the evidence in this book to be a wee-bit too clever. There's a lot of "we have all thought X, but nobody looked at Y!" Which I like. It's always good to question the dominant theories and practices. But the authors only rely on one example for each point they make, and when one of them is an interview from "This American Life," and another is a study by - blech! - Michael Bailey, it's hard to really believe this is a totally well researched book.
Part III. "The Way We Weren't" is actually the part I found most fascinating, as they take apart Hobbes' description of the early life of man as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." I think this is a well-crafted deconstruction of many of the myths we hold dear in understanding our past. I would assign this part in any writing class to show how to take apart an argument. It is a brilliant essay.
But when it actually comes to understanding the myth of monogamy, I felt they tried to show a lack of normalcy, but ended up with: hey, men just like new sex partners. Which I think undermines so much of what they tried to do throughout the book, discussing sexual desire being as powerful an urge for women as for men, that no culture that promotes monogamy can actually sustain it for all people, that biologically we fuck way more than we reproduce, etc. But then in the end all they end up arguing is that monogamy is hard and we should all try to understand that. Meh.
Finally, I read this book after Dan Savage promoted it on his podcast, and I thought it might be a more anthropological study of Michael Warner's The Trouble With Normal, but there were merely passing references to homosexuality throughout the book - even with the enormity of time spent on Bonobo sexuality. But, this was my own eagerness for that topic coming through and not a critique of what actually was written.
This is one of the finest attempts I have read recently in trying to create a book for public consumption and academic interest. Grandin does a seamle...moreThis is one of the finest attempts I have read recently in trying to create a book for public consumption and academic interest. Grandin does a seamless job at interjecting the ideas of intellectuals present and past into his prose without you even noticing that he is doing exemplary work on historiography as well as on history.
The work is complex, compelling, thoroughly researched - you learn something new on every page, either about Henry Ford, Brazil, the Ford Company, the Amazon, engineering techniques, botany, you get the idea. The book was packed with so much information that it read much more slowly than I thought it would.
My complaint came only at the end of the story, where Grandin tries to wrap up his work in a tidy little bow of the exploits of globalization. While I agree that Fordlandia was indeed a good example of the failure of globalization a little less than a century ago - I'm not sure it LEAD to the same kind of issues Grandin implies. Yes - Fordism and the breaking up of work into tiny components that can be done all over the world did lead to the wage-slave-labor that our global economy finds us in now. I don't begrudge him that point. But what is the overall point of his story of Fordlandia? I think he misses the boat here. Because the mistakes made then are the same as the mistakes made now, not only by multi-national corporations, but by our own state and defense departments when attempting to take on cultures so different from western ones - that of arrogance, hubris, a clear lack of intellectual curiosity towards difference, and a severe lack of long term planning.
I also believe he missed a critical theme here by not explaining how Fordlandia became lost in the public American memory. I had never even heard of this scheme before I read the book - yet newspapers, radio, even cinema followed the exploits of Ford in the Amazon throughout the years they were there. Why (or perhaps more to the point, how) did Fordlandia and the lessons learned there fall out of the history books? Perhaps globalization might look different today if those lessons had been shared throughout the decades. (less)
I'm putting this on the queer shelf because I think Capote's lens is in fact a queer one. The story itself, about a close-knit community and the outsi...moreI'm putting this on the queer shelf because I think Capote's lens is in fact a queer one. The story itself, about a close-knit community and the outsiders who change the sleepy town forever is indeed a queer look at farm life in the early 1960s. I admit, I read it after I saw Capote, but I did find it amazing in it's own right. Also, the fact that he both revolutionized non-fiction writing, and never really wrote again, how could you not want to read it? (less)
Absolutely depressing. If you want to know why we're still in Iraq, this is a must read. Worse than the characters in Messud's The Emperor's Children,...moreAbsolutely depressing. If you want to know why we're still in Iraq, this is a must read. Worse than the characters in Messud's The Emperor's Children, the cast of characters charged with rebuilding Iraq were arrogant, stupid, inexperienced children of the rich and privileged. A horror story if ever there was one, oh, and it's true.(less)
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