It is unlikely that we have ever heard a history like this one about political leadership in America before, during and after WWII. The focus is intimIt is unlikely that we have ever heard a history like this one about political leadership in America before, during and after WWII. The focus is intimate and at the same time national: the author’s grandmother, Eunice Hunton Carter, was the most widely known Black Republican working as a deputy assistant district attorney in New York City during the second world war. She was instrumental in the conviction of Lucky Luciano of mob control of the prostitution racket in New York City in the 1930s.
Back when the history of Black Americans was still being ignored by the mainstream white press, Eunice Hunton Carter was blazing a path and creating her own weather. Eunice Carter was Black royalty, being the daughter of two leaders, William Alphaeus Hunton and Addie Waites Hunton, who were instrumental in the development of YMCA/YWCA and NAACP from the earliest days.
Her grandson, Stephen L. Carter, a lawyer and award-winning novelist, had plenty of material to use for this book because Eunice’s every move was covered by a mostly adoring Black press, first as a member of Harlem “sassiety” and especially after she ran for office [and lost]. Not winning public office left her open to accept another opportunity. A special prosecutor, Thomas E. Dewey, was appointed to try the mob in NYC court; he hired twenty lawyers. One was Eunice.
What so fascinates me is the way we get all turned around in party politics at this time. Democrats in New York were crooks, all part of Tammany Hall’s criminal coterie…and racist. Republicans were racist also, but at least made noise about giving opportunity to qualified Black Americans, for honoring those who fought in WWII and for ending discriminatory practices. Eunice never had all the opportunities her talents promised and was never paid what she was worth, but she was respected.
This book presents a look at 1940s and 50s history that we have never had the opportunity to read: what life was like for Black people, even well-educated and well-traveled Black people. The author tells of Governor Dewey running again and again for president with fervent and furious campaigning help by Eunice Carter, and finally, famously, losing to Truman.
The author is careful and generous with his grandmother’s memory. He picks out her many failures to advance–she was a striver and had a thirst for responsibility– and tries to be evenhanded with the reasons for those failures. There was plenty of blame to spread around: Eunice was charming and ‘regal’ is a word that is used by observers, but perhaps not as warm and ordinary as those who make friends easily. She was honored and admired.
Her own family life seemed a little like her own, growing up: the children were left to someone else. Schooling was distant, with limited opportunities to spend what we now call ‘quality time’ with parents. Eunice had a son, Lisle, Jr., who became an important federal appointee later, in the late 60s. Eunice was a Republican in a time when Democrats were in ascendancy. She never got her appointment to higher office in Washington, though she wouldn’t have said no if the opportunity called. ...more
Not done with this and will have to step away for awhile. Will reread when opportunity provides. Deeply interesting and not something to whiz through.Not done with this and will have to step away for awhile. Will reread when opportunity provides. Deeply interesting and not something to whiz through. Stoppping temporarily at page 290. Want to make notes of a couple places. p.282: "How come you never got another cat? I just didnt want to lose anything else."
p. 180: "Do you believe in God, Bobby? I dont know Granellen. You asked me that before. I told you. I dont know anything. The best I can say is that I think he and I have pretty much the same opinions. On my better days anyway."
p. 32: "He slept until evening and then got up and showered and dressed and went out." Immediately recognizable.
Merged review:
Not done with this and will have to step away for awhile. Will reread when opportunity provides. Deeply interesting and not something to whiz through. Stoppping temporarily at page 290. Want to make notes of a couple places. p.282: "How come you never got another cat? I just didnt want to lose anything else."
p. 180: "Do you believe in God, Bobby? I dont know Granellen. You asked me that before. I told you. I dont know anything. The best I can say is that I think he and I have pretty much the same opinions. On my better days anyway."
p. 32: "He slept until evening and then got up and showered and dressed and went out." Immediately recognizable.
Merged review:
Not done with this and will have to step away for awhile. Will reread when opportunity provides. Deeply interesting and not something to whiz through. Stoppping temporarily at page 290. Want to make notes of a couple places. p.282: "How come you never got another cat? I just didnt want to lose anything else."
p. 180: "Do you believe in God, Bobby? I dont know Granellen. You asked me that before. I told you. I dont know anything. The best I can say is that I think he and I have pretty much the same opinions. On my better days anyway."
p. 32: "He slept until evening and then got up and showered and dressed and went out." Immediately recognizable....more
Percival Everett is quite unlike anyone else. Just like the university course in this novel given by a professor named Percival Everett, this book is Percival Everett is quite unlike anyone else. Just like the university course in this novel given by a professor named Percival Everett, this book is nonsense. A black man who looks like Sidney Poitier is named Not Sidney Poitier, which leads to some absurdist conversations. Not Sidney is rich as Croesus, or rather, as rich as Ted Turner of CNN fame, which allows him to do pretty much whatever he wants. But what does he want?
As with all Percival Everett books, this is worth reading just to see where his mind is going...we can all see his mind is going, but if you want to know where, check this out.
And please. Go see the film American Fiction. It is the film version of Erasure. I am looking forward to seeing it next week....more
The 28th president of Harvard University, Drew Gilpin Faust was the first woman and the first Southerner in the job. She had a relatively long tenure,The 28th president of Harvard University, Drew Gilpin Faust was the first woman and the first Southerner in the job. She had a relatively long tenure, 2007-2018, given the way things are going now. This memoir outlines her family's family and "how she got to be that way," but what it really does is show how she sprung singular from the head of Athena, the war goddess.
It seems Faust was always destined to fight against the strictures and unfairnesses she observed from her place in restricted White southern society. But her way of telling the story chafed. Perhaps it is because I am nearly her age and I ache to think no one was able to break down the barriers behind which her mother hid before her early death. Faust is smart, well-educated and articulate but she chafes, knowing so much.
She ends her memoir at the time of her graduation from college. One presumes she went on to honors and studying history. I remember when she was chosen to lead Harvard--I was impressed and proud, being a woman myself. I admire what she was able to do but I don't have to like her, do I?...more
Do I really need to tell you to read this book? It is not dense, but it is uncomfortable-making. That is a good thing. If you ever dared say you werenDo I really need to tell you to read this book? It is not dense, but it is uncomfortable-making. That is a good thing. If you ever dared say you weren't sure what a microaggression is, you will have example after example of the kind of rubbish Black Americans have had to put up with, like, forever. It pains me, but you can bet it pains them a great deal more.
There is so much we need to learn about the lives of Black Americans, how they were, how they are. I recall thinking when I was a teen that we white people were not privy to the mysteries...there seemed no way to get that knowledge unless one lived together in one neighborhood. And we did not. Shame, in all senses of the word.
One paragraph hit me like a club:
As a measure of the enduring role of caste interests in American politics, the shadow of the Civil War seemed to hang over the 2008 election. It turned out that Obama carried every state that Abraham Lincoln had won in 1860, an election with an almost entirely white electorate but one that became a proxy for egalitarian sentiment and for the future of slavery and of the Republic. "The cultural divide of the Civil War on racial grounds," wrote the political scientist Patrick Fisher of Seton Hall University, "can thus still be considered to be influencing American political culture a century and a half later."
Amazing book. Fascinating story, stupendous research. Woo keeps researching to the very end, looking at the families that came from the union of Willi Amazing book. Fascinating story, stupendous research. Woo keeps researching to the very end, looking at the families that came from the union of William and Ellen Craft, uncovering details that make the whole feel very real indeed. The world was in turmoil in 1848, you won’t be surprised to learn. But I wasn’t prepared for how the moment is mirrored in what is happening today: the sharp divides, fake news, screaming denunciations and posted threats.
Ellen and William Craft, two slaves owned by different masters, decided one Christmas that the time was ripe for them to escape to the north using a plan they’d prepared in four days. She would dress as a young man and he would be her manservant slave. She’d had experience traveling with her master and so knew how things outside her plantation worked. He was tall and capable and calm under stress, but their plans were upended more ways than one.
The Crafts were received with warmth by abolitionists in Philadelphia though they were cautious to the point of near-refusing the generosity of a Quaker family, the Ivins: “I have no confidence whatsoever in white people. They are only trying to get us back to slavery,” Ellen later reports. Later, Woo describes the sentiment among escaped slaves that included Frederick Douglass in Boston:
“once back in the States [from England], Douglass had grown increasingly angry, disillusioned, and impatient with American abolitionists, who moved so slowly and too often betrayed their own prejudices, subtle or not. Even some in [social reformer and journalist William Lloyd] Garrison’s closest circle were know to utter racial expletives on occasion.”
Once the Crafts were [safely? no…] on the lecture circuit in New England, I sought out Woo’s own explanation of how she did her research. Several of those interviews are on YouTube and in each, the questions and her answers are slightly different, but one comes away with the sense that the narrative propelled research into the time. The Crafts wrote their own personal histories, but with many pieces that Woo wanted to know missing.
The Craft’s escape from slavery wasn’t that long ago, a fact that continues to horrify me. We’re talking the length of two human lives ago. Crazy. But it’s been as chaotic and tempestuous and argumentative in the United States before now, and what we have learned is that people in general do not change until they are absolutely forced to change. Witness slavery. Witness environmental protection. There will still be breakouts of resistance against change going forward, but gradually we will come to see slavery and environmental degradation as great wrongs.
This story of escape is dense. There is so much Woo is telling us that we did not know that three hundred some-odd pages does not feel too long. We sense the depth of research and know there is more to mine from this story. Context is everything. Woo writes sentences that hint at interesting side trails; she names names in the places the Crafts overnighted. Even though it probably should be self-evident that by the 1848 the antislavery movement was well established, this feels new.
One thing that stuck with me is that Ellen Craft was ‘owned’ by her blood sister when she escaped. In fact, Ellen was gifted to that sister Eliza upon Eliza’s marriage because the wife of Ellen’s father and mistress of the house in which she worked was angry that people kept mistaking Ellen for one of that mistress’ white daughters. She looked so much like the husband…But forever after Ellen Craft would not speak ill of Eliza, her sister by blood and her mistress at the time of her abscondment.
Woo speculates that the names of Ellen and William Craft are not better known because their lives were complicated and had no period of ‘happily ever after.’ Perhaps that is true. Certainly it casts a pall over their American story to know how hard it was for them right to the end, and how one obstacle overcome only showed a higher mountain right behind. But it is also true that in America, white folks do not like to be reminded of times when they relied on the labor of slaves to build their fortunes. That could be a reason their story is not retold in schools and in theatre.
This totally fascinating book well deserves the raining plaudits. ...more
Word of this book’s popularity spread and I received the book with assurances I may find it interesting. Indeed, I did. Enraptured with octopus anywayWord of this book’s popularity spread and I received the book with assurances I may find it interesting. Indeed, I did. Enraptured with octopus anyway, I was surprised debut author Van Pelt managed to pull this off as a fiction, but it worked very well after a sluggish first half.
While I am not usually interested in reading about a grumpy older woman, in this case Tove reminded me so much of people of Nordic descent that I have known that I found her approachable. And Marcellus, the octopus, well…he was a wonder and lovable in his invertebrate way. Probably the most disturbing portrait in the story was that of a teenaged boy who imagined himself unloved and who appeared destined to flame out in a drugged and drunken stupor before he even knew the good bits. It felt too real to be comfortable.
Tove is certifiably old, at 70 years, but to keep busy and because she finds it interesting, she works at a cleaner at a local aquarium on the northwest coast of the U.S. She notices that Marcellus appears to watch her from his hiding place and she makes efforts to befriend him. It works! Marcellus loses a bit of his fear and Tove allows him to escape his tank to eat some of the ‘seafood’ in the other tanks at night without telling the management.
Its a reasonable arrangement until Tove hurts herself falling off a ladder. Then things start to unravel and the book takes flight. The second half of the story is propulsive and hard to put down, so involved are we with the lives of these characters. Van Pelt does a great job of writing with enough depth that we understand and recognize the motivations of all players and are grateful for the opportunity to think long and hard about the octopus Marcellus.
I read recently that fishermen are planning to make octopus the center of the seafood menus in restaurants now (now that they have managed to overfish all other types of seafood). I would urge everyone to think more than twice about choosing octopus to eat. We really do not want this species to collapse. Also, if you have access to Netflix, please try to see the film, My Octopus Teacher, written and directed by a South African diver who spent a year befriending an octopus off the west coast of Cape Town....more
Percival Everett is a Black man. And he does something very special in this book—his 1000th, I think, or something like that. He imagines what would hPercival Everett is a Black man. And he does something very special in this book—his 1000th, I think, or something like that. He imagines what would happen when time come for retribution. And it ain’t gonna look like Donald Trump imagines it. (view spoiler)[ The thing is, he’s so funny when he’s telling us what could happen. We’re snickering and really, it is pretty gruesome. But he’s got the whole security pyramid working on the case before they realize exactly what is happening, the FBI, the state police, the local cops…everybody is trying to figure out who is doing these killings.
The thing is, it isn’t just killings. It is mutilations, and inventive ways of killing that are each a little different across the country. To remind folks about Emmett Till, and to take their pound of flesh for what happened to him. But my goodness, to make that funny, one has to be some kind of writer. And Everett is that. (hide spoiler)]...more
This novel doesn’t read now the way it did to me as a younger reader. Deeply explicatory of the ways people arrange their brains to suit the facts thaThis novel doesn’t read now the way it did to me as a younger reader. Deeply explicatory of the ways people arrange their brains to suit the facts that show them in the best light, it is a cynical book but not a cruel one. This is the way people act, moral or not, so we’d best take that feature into account when facing criminal charges.
First published on a fortnightly basis as a 27-part serialization in Rolling Stone magazine in 1984, this first novel of Tom Wolfe was later published, with revisions, by Farrar Straus & Giroux in 1987. With the book publication, Mr. Wolfe became a cause célèbre. He’d been disappointed with the reaction of the public to the magazine serialization and that earlier effort seems to have been almost lost to history:
It felt all the more ironic given the book’s title. The first vanities bonfire happened in Florence, Italy in 1497 when supporters of friar Girolamo Savonarola publicly burned what they considered vain objects – books, art, music, anything deemed immoral. It’s easy to see Wolfe playing the part of Savonarola, eradicating all evidence of his early attempts at fiction.
Considering Bonfire was Wolfe’s first novel, it was a marvel of description, capturing the technicolor of the Wall Street bond market, the holding pen in the Bronx Criminal Courts Building, as well as the well-padded offices of Reverend Bacon, the profitable nonprofit savant.
The language is the thing to enjoy here. Plot is not this book’s strong suit. I read with real admiration Wolfe’s description of a crime victim, shot dead in the back of a Cadillac: “The victim was a fat man with his hands on his legs, just above his knees, as if he were about to hitch up his pants to keep them from being stretched by his kneecaps.”
Somehow that description blew me away. The next sentence, how the rear window of the Cadillac looked like someone had thrown a pizza against it, confirmed that the victim himself had, in fact, been blown away.
Wolfe claimed in a couple places that there was truth in the saying that “A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.” That’s his own ‘saying’ and the first time I read it I laughed. When I read it again, I wondered…I don’t think that is true anymore, fifty years later.
So, I am still scratching my head over the title. I am inclined to agree with another reader who has pointed out this is probably less of a bonfire of the vanities than a celebration of them, but perhaps the title refers to the main character, Sherman (Shuhmun) McCoy.
Sherman McCoy, whose name recalls the ‘real thing,’ is in fact, ‘the real McCoy’ insofar as he is a man untouched by human drama to this point in his life. Raised in wealth and working in bonds, he has hardly had occasion to consider what a ‘bump in the road’ might mean to the ordinary man on the street.
In the beginning, McCoy is fearful and respectful, still, of law enforcement and legal matters in general though gradually one can perceive his discernment increasing as time—and his opportunities for incarceration—go on. Perhaps the title is not meant as anything other than the notion that the innocence of man, in the larger and smaller senses, is set alight every day in urban America, were we only aware....more
Of all the theories I’ve examined in the past several years that might explain the ghastly social and political division in our society, the one propoOf all the theories I’ve examined in the past several years that might explain the ghastly social and political division in our society, the one proposed by political commentator and opinion writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer Will Bunch was one I hadn’t considered. His thesis, the insistence that we all attend college at age 18 or our employment futures are doomed, is one he insists is wrong-headed. The fact that colleges have become profit centers for bankers should give all of us pause. The lack of financial assistance and the subsequent vast raft of unpaid college debt is surely a burden on us all.
After WWII, the GI Bill offered inexpensive educational opportunities for returning servicemen and was so popular that the federal government attempted to extend similar possibilities to the general population in conjunction with state schools.
As Bunch explains it, Ronald Reagan was one of the first to express disdain for the leftist student protesters in the 1960s that the country was basically funding to go to school since the Second World War. Reagan tried to impose tuition increases and reminded taxpayers that ought not “subsidize intellectual curiosity,” but should focus on workplace development, an attitude that entered Republican consciousness and traveled underground until we saw it rear its head in 21st C Wisconsin with the rise of Scott Walker.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker left college in his third year, he was so set on school being a road a to a job. Once he got a job, with the Red Cross, what need did he have of an education? [Many of us, looking at his career and justifications for policy set while he was governor, might have much to say on this subject.] His under-financing of state schools within Wisconsin since his ascension to the governorship had tremendous impact on staff and educators, to say nothing of students. To witness the impoverishment of a state, one need look no further. The rural folk complained about the clueless ‘educated,’ all the while the actual educated were leaving the state to its misery by getting jobs elsewhere.
“College started becoming more expensive and less accessible right at the very moment it became critical for getting a job,” writes Bunch. Funding for higher education fell routinely in the 1980s and continued that trajectory: “in 1980, a Pell Grant covered 75 percent of the cost of attending instate public university, but today it’s roughly 30 percent.” No longer was higher education considered ‘public good.’
The way funding was withheld from colleges and universities so that the promise of advancement via a debt-free education crumbled. If education were no longer available to ordinary folks without extraordinary funds, they claimed to become centers for “meritocracy.” The deserving, whether exceptional in talent, brains, or need, became the focus of college admissions.
Those with lower incomes “couldn’t afford” school that didn’t promise immediate employment; those with slightly higher risk profiles but no more money entered the debt economy. The change in prospects for younger folks put increasing pressure on their parents to pay for educations whose costs increased annually while state funding decreased in direct proportion.
Bunch suggests the rise of radio was a contributing factor in exacerbating division in rural America. All-day national talk radio was some of the only programming rural folks in many states could access, broadband not being universally available in the countryside. Blanket broadcasting is still happening in Pennsylvania with its wide rural expanses and radio talk show hosts appear to be hyped-up evangelists for grievance about the college-educated.
By the mid-2000s the college dream of meritocracy and affordability had come apart. High-wealth individuals like Jared Kushner were entering the best universities (Harvard) without proven intellectual gifts. College was a business, a business the entire country was paying to keep afloat. Goldman Sacs was even purchasing student debt by the early 2010s, not unlike their willing exposure to sub-prime housing loans. This was the currency of our disablement, the scam of higher ed.
The collapse of trust in the basic agreement—I pay tuition and you give me a job—parallels the widening gap between college graduates and high-school graduates. Political attitudes appear to be defined in its greatest sense by whether or not one attended college or simply high school. Bunch, a father himself, finds the whole discussion about college costs absurd. How can 18-yr-olds ever get out from behind the debt? High school students are essentially blank slates who have little clue what the world offers. Bunch suggests that perhaps instead of paying their debt, we give them a chance to earn their way into college through national service.
It is a good idea, an idea whose time has come and gone and come again. The idea will probably be the source of much further division among political parties, but if there were people seriously thinking about how to go about it, I think it may be time to get it started. Perhaps the naysayers can keep their kids on the corporate track, if they want. The rest of us can give our high school leavers the chance to spend a little time learning about the world firsthand, earning a wage, learning how to work, figuring out what they don’t want to do while thinking about how to keep the world from coming apart at the seams. It wouldn’t be wasted. Count me a supporter....more
Before Tony Horwitz died suddenly, in 2019 at the age of 60, he wrote about things that mattered. He brought a sense of humor to interesting and sometBefore Tony Horwitz died suddenly, in 2019 at the age of 60, he wrote about things that mattered. He brought a sense of humor to interesting and sometimes difficult subjects. He wrote this stand-alone short book about the XL pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, a subject which is/was dear to my heart. It seemed there was no length the petroleum companies would not go to persist in this outdated fuel.
Horwitz showed what it was like to work for the pipeline, to be exploited by pipeline and to be opposed by the pipeline. For those who always thought the XL pipeline is "probably the stupidist thing mankind has thought up," this book's for you....more
Remarkably revealing and useful for understanding what it is like to be an actor before one hits it big in the movies. The only reason I gave it less Remarkably revealing and useful for understanding what it is like to be an actor before one hits it big in the movies. The only reason I gave it less than five stars is that the later years in her life were not so much part of this. I can understand why, but that is why it is hard to write . Anyway, she did a brilliant job considering the forces arrayed against organizing one's thoughts and finding the time to do a project like this. I admire her more for having pulled it off without melting down completely. ...more
Horse, the story of a great racing stallion from Kentucky named Lexington, encompasses an arc of American history that cuts still today. Australian auHorse, the story of a great racing stallion from Kentucky named Lexington, encompasses an arc of American history that cuts still today. Australian author Geraldine Brooks puts her finger on the sensitive places in America’s living history which we as a society have not yet resolved: our relationship with America’s early racial legacy, slavery.
The colonial powers of the 18th- and 19th centuries all have complicated histories with race, but America stands apart as a country built explicitly on the notion of equality for all men. The founders just didn’t ‘cotton’ the connection properly between Blackness, economic prosperity, rights and freedom. The Civil War was meant to set them straight, but it didn’t actually do that. Nothing civil about it…then or now.
The horse Lexington, described on two continents as the “greatest racing stallion in American turf history,” and slavery have a shared history, both in reality and in this fiction. There are pre-Civil War written and painted records of Lexington’s groom and trainer, both Black men in Kentucky, a state which would hover in-between the Union and Confederate armies and be bled by both.
We hear the story of a White Union soldier who initially finds himself seeking out prisoners “to better understand their minds.” Gradually, he realizes those men “were lost to a narrative untethered to anything he recognized as true.” Author Brooks connects our history with America today.
In a Brooks novel, readers enjoy the author’s passions…for history, science, horses, art…and for her native land, Australia. Brooks doesn’t give her own country a pass in the race relations area, giving voice to a critic of Canberra’s policies. She successfully details examples of microaggressions, some that go out into the world and are recognized for such, just as they land, by all witnesses.
The embarrassment of recognizing one’s own prejudices spills onto the reader, making us cautious but willing to learn more about how these impulses buried deep inside suddenly materialize and how they impact those around us. One of the more interesting characters who brings out the reader’s prejudices remains only sketched lightly in the background: a gruff woman of diminished means who throws out on the sidewalk an old and dirty painting of a horse and to whom we impute a nasty attitude totally dissimilar to our own good intentions.
Horse is a wonderful read, filled with surprising discoveries and twists we do not see coming. In the Afterword, Brooks reminds us that her husband, Tony Horwitz, was a Civil War historian who approved of her turn towards this history in her novel before his untimely and sudden death in 2019. What a wonder that this terrific book was birthed in midst of such great sorrow and loss....more
She has reason to be angry but she is only occasionally lashing. I know our history was hidden from us because i raised it also, in high school. Why dShe has reason to be angry but she is only occasionally lashing. I know our history was hidden from us because i raised it also, in high school. Why didn't we know more about Black people? ...more
I don’t quite know what to make of this book. I read it because I now live in a state a large portion of whose population is deluged with far right TVI don’t quite know what to make of this book. I read it because I now live in a state a large portion of whose population is deluged with far right TV and talk radio. A large number of people do not have broadband and therefore often do not know there are newspapers and TV stations which make an effort to substantiate news.
There is a disparity in information: the rural areas have been kept the equivalent of “barefoot and pregnant” by a state legislature that couldn't figure out how to fund failing schools and provide broadband.
This book is a study of Jennifer Silva’s time interviewing residents of a former coal town in Pennsylvania, finding out what their lives are like, how they see their personal and professional trajectories, and who they vote for and why.
Not being a social scientist, I found the stories Dr. Silva shares with us confounding. Maybe someone can come up with solutions for these folks, but the reason they don’t vote is that they basically don’t trust anyone after the life they’ve led. In one of the first couples described to us, Silva writes,
“They are not single-issue voters who prioritize social issues such as abortion or fund control over economic interests, not do they place themselves into clear-cut categories of Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative. Most of the time, as they attempt to come to terms with their past traumas and future anxieties, they do not think about politics at all.”
Right. Silva’s mentor/thesis advisor might have anticipated this and suggested a less-stressed environment. If Silva was just wondering what was going on in towns like Coal Brook, I would understand that, too, but she admits she’d been hoping to find out what white rural conservatives were thinking about politics when she began.
Soon enough she found out her interviewees were unschooled and inarticulate on the subject of “politics.” She did hear, though, these white residents’ dissatisfaction with Black and Latin “newcomers” to the coal region, former city dwellers and immigrants. So she changed her focus a little to include the newcomers. That was smart, and refocused this work into something approaching Arlie Russell Hochschild’s award-winning Strangers in Their Own Land.
Maybe someone, after reading outcomes for poor white folks who grew up in an abandoned coal town or poor city dwellers who moved in to live inexpensively and get away from inner-city violence, will figure out a way to point these folks in a different direction, in the direction of a life that is more fulfilling and less crushing. But this is way outside my wheelhouse....more
I am grateful to the author for taking the time to recount the dispiriting shenanigans of lawmakers in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania over a period of yearsI am grateful to the author for taking the time to recount the dispiriting shenanigans of lawmakers in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania over a period of years: the late 2000s to the early 2010s. Perhaps I should amend that to include Philadelphia, of whom there were several standout criminals among the Harrisburg gang. Author Bumstead still is a political reporter in PA, and he must have thought, "this needs to be recorded for posterity," it is such a blowout case.
Later, Bumstead did another book Keystone Corruption Continues: Cash Payoffs, Porngate and the Kathleen Kane Scandal, still focusing on the deep stew of corrupt officials in PA, and I have to admit it is hard to take in. It must have been hard to catalog the ways people hired to represent the people can go so astray and not lose one's sense of purpose. But there you have it.
Anyway, this is the kind of thing that makes one shiver at night and hug one's children close.
Charlotte Carter. We are lucky to be alive in this time when publishers are doing the right thing for themselves AND for us by republishing terrific, Charlotte Carter. We are lucky to be alive in this time when publishers are doing the right thing for themselves AND for us by republishing terrific, under-read authors. Charlotte Carter is new to me but she is one of the best writers for a kind of hard-boiled mystery reminiscent of Raymond Chandler and the kind of glamour and won’t-look-away savvy of Nina Simone and James Baldwin.
Nanette Hayes is the series. Described as “a Grace Jones lookalike in terms of coloring and body type (she has the better waist, I win for tits)”, Nan is, when we meet her, busking on NYC streets with a saxophone, supplementing part-time work as a translator, French to English.
As far as I can tell, the series is only three novels long, but Carter has such a delicious and particular voice, you’re going to want to read all of this in a rush of indulgence. The first book in the series, Rhode Island Red, comes out July 27, just in time for long hot days in the hammock. August and September bring the last two, Coq Au Vin and Drumsticks. It’s like eating bonbons—very hard to resist.
First published in 1997, Rhode Island Red is written from a Black woman’s perspective and set in New York City just after stop-and-frisk was added to our lexicon. Cops were hated then, maybe even more than now? Even the title is a mystery; we don’t even know what the title means until close to the end but if you were to guess…
Nanette longs for France but grew up in the States as a child prodigy in maths, languages and spelling, of all things. One day another sax street player—a White man a little older than she—shows up needing a place to stay…and who ends up dead within hours.
It’s a complicated story, as it always must be when a stranger gets killed inside one’s own apartment. Nan calls the cops, only to have them question her motivation in bringing him home to her apartment. It’s a good question, one that Nanette will spend the rest of the story asking herself.
Carter wasn’t ahead of her time. She was playing old tunes in the 90s, but they were the anthem of the century. In a sense, she was closing the joint. We as a country are just catching up with her now. Radical. Real. Rhode Island Red....more
Crisis Deluxe is the debut novel of a former investment banker. Honestly, the work sounds as though it would kill with anxiety anyone who suffers fromCrisis Deluxe is the debut novel of a former investment banker. Honestly, the work sounds as though it would kill with anxiety anyone who suffers from imposter syndrome. A rougher bunch of the over-compensated would be hard to find.
Super-charged self-satisfaction is not hard to find these days in lots of professions; it may even be a prerequisite for some positions. I am quite sure it has something to do with compensation: “I mean, if I’m paid this much, I must be good! Right?”
What works in this novel is the complicated story of the buy-out of an investment bank headquartered in Hong Kong by a bigger investment bank based in New York. Money, as ordinary folks know it, is a different beast in this world; our interest lies in learning its new definition, realizing the dimensions of its reach and the emptiness of its pleasures.
Things we would ordinarily treasure—out-of-reach gustatory delights, trips around the world, rides in Rolls Royce and expensive clothing—are paired with the scent of sweat, exhaustion and even blood.
Mostly we recognize money is not worth what we give up to get it, something minimum wage and gig workers have discovered post-pandemic in America. But I cannot be completely sure if that lesson is one I learned in this book or if it was merely confirmed to me there.
The investment banker at the heart of this fiction introduces himself like James Bond: “Street. Alexander Street.” Great name. Street is sent to Hong Kong from South America where is he finishing one deal so he can save another going very bad as Asian financial markets teeter and crater. Why the market is unstable is never discussed which prompts my usual skepticism over Wall Street and SEHK shenanigans.
Financial markets are built on trust, and bankers showed us their empty shirts in the last 20 years. IMHO, they simply know there are ways to make money in shaky markets but don’t have the brains, heart or knowledge to tell us why.
Street works out of NYC but his parentage is European. With that he has the best of both worlds: credibility and deniability. He can deny being a hated Yank while having the backing of a big, fat American investment bank. The story involves us in the details of the Hong Kong company’s balance sheet and its status as the continent’s first successful purveyor of corporate bonds. As the market falters, holders of commercial debt begin to limit their exposure by calling in loan payments just when companies are least likely to be able to pay.
Powerful interests around Hong Kong’s city-state begin to move as the investment bank buyout is reimagined. When a wealthy but uninvolved friend of Street’s is murdered before his eyes at dinner one night, we never really get full satisfaction. Murder, and its cousin poisoning, usually require more explanation both to and by the police than we received in this novel. Like in any country, when a rich person dies, there are ripples.
There is a romantic interest in this novel but it is odd. In the manner of all things masculine, Alexander Street does not excessively, or even adequately, question when his gorgeous high-school sweetheart of thirty years before suddenly shows up, willing and able to involve herself in a romantic liaison with him, despite the fact both are long-and-happily married. That she is the older sister of a difficult young bond salesman involved in the bank buyout raises warning flags for women readers but barely touch the consciousness of Street. Alexander Street.
The ending kept me guessing and was climactic. See for yourself.
P.S. I met Chris Coffman on Goodreads. He wrote some of the most insightful and interesting reviews I came across...oh, some long time ago now. Then he dropped off as a result of being consumed with writing his own mystery. I hope you pick this up to encourage such efforts....more
I finished this at least a year ago. The book was thoroughly spiked with markers pointing to remarkable notes of historical fact or insights that onlyI finished this at least a year ago. The book was thoroughly spiked with markers pointing to remarkable notes of historical fact or insights that only this woman at this time could make. I hadn't known very much about the institution called League of Women Voters before picking this up but since that time, I have learned much more.
We can see so clearly how imperfect we are and get some notion of what we need to do to make this group work for everyone. For change to be effective, we would have to stay working with an imperfect organization to make it better. You know how sometimes your instinct is to just leave...that you cannot change it all by yourself...and then you see someone who is leading by example?
This book is like that. Real leadership. Real work. Real....more
David Daley wants us to feel good about ordinary citizen attempts to push back on states and national political parties for constraining our voting riDavid Daley wants us to feel good about ordinary citizen attempts to push back on states and national political parties for constraining our voting rights, documented in so many states across our Union.
But in doing so he also shows us how the fight in many states has become more and more bitterly partisan, particularly when savvy grassroots organizing leads to galvanizing wins…and then to resurgent attempts by a weakened party apparatus to find legal grounds to reject the changes sought, reneging on promises made.
A win in this climate is not really a win. It is a way station on a mountain path, a peak not yet crested. Perhaps that is the lesson of this endeavor: we never arrive but must fight for our democracy every. single. day.
Daley has an entertaining style that distracts little from technical, tactical battles being fought in each state. New Voter ID requirements, hurdles to ballot initiatives, restrictions on voter registration or absentee balloting, egregious gerrymandering: these are the things voters around America are worked up about, and fighting against.
Each state has different objective conditions, but in each it appears that the popular resistance is fighting a statewide battle while legislators seeking to preserve their position are receiving instructions and money from their national party. The fight is unequal in funding and reach but also unequal in ingenuity and persistence. It is heartening to see that better funding is not always the sign of a winning hand.
The gerrymandering battle fought in deep-Red Utah resulted in a win for the ballot initiative in 2018 but in 2020 the legislature forced Better Boundaries, Utah’s anti-gerrymandering group, to accept a compromise solution that allows incumbent information to be used when creating maps, and instituting the requirement that legislators do not have to accept proposed maps. This shows the weakness of ballot initiatives. They are easier to pass…and easier to repeal.
In Michigan the redistricting reform petition led by a youthful reformer profiled in the recently released documentary Slay the Dragon got onto the ballot in 2018 and passed with some 61% of the vote. Since then however, the Republican-dominated legislature first tried to defund the commission and then filed in federal court declaring the commission unconstitutional. A call went out early 2020, nonetheless, to all eligible voters in Michigan to apply to become a part of the new redistricting commission. As of this writing in April 2020, over 6,000 citizens have responded to the call to establish a 13-member commission. Applications close in July.
Daley shows us that “when voters are given a choice, fairness wins…more than a three-quarters of the congressional seats that changed hands in 2018 were drawn by either commissions or courts. Fairer districts led not only to more competitive races, but also to election results that were responsive to a shift in public opinion.”
Missouri voters initiated a constitutional amendment mandating fair maps and the state legislature immediately proposed an amendment to disarm the citizens’ initiative. New commission requirements adopted in Ohio continue to give a role to legislators, and to require a role for judiciary if commissioners cannot agree.
At the risk of sounding despairing, I will note that I am a member of the rebellion…in Pennsylvania…to end partisan gerrymandering. We were in the last four months of an accelerating squeeze on the state legislature to pass legislation that will allow us to create an independent redistricting commission based on the California model: eleven commissioners randomly-selected from a vetted pool of regular PA citizenry. The corona virus stopped us cold.
Daley mentions Pennsylvania among his descriptions of states fighting back against legislative overreach, describing the astounding win handed to anti-gerrymandering forces by the State Supreme Court in 2018 who ruled that the 2010 congressional maps and the remedial fix were badly skewed to protect ruling party interests in the state. A special master from out-of-state drew new maps used in the 2018 election for congressional districts, leveling the playing field a little. The fix was temporary and left legislators free to do it all again in 2021.
The fight for fairer state legislative district maps continues in Pennsylvania and that is where we left it in early March when corona came calling. At least now we have time to look around at the changes elsewhere and see where we stand. Zachary Roth of the Brennan Center thinks states are winning the fight against gerrymandering, and I want it to be true. It is a never-ending battle, and we need all those who value liberty to stand with us and demand protection for our rights.
The end of Daley’s book leaves all of us reformers across the country in the same unsettled place. Daley interviews conservative, former Republican writers and pundits and comes to the conclusion that the party is so changed and susceptible to authoritarianism that it may not survive its own evolution. Our democracy probably won’t survive their evolution, either....more
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