I took my first flight in over a year on the first federal holiday of Juneteenth. This book was the perfect short read. The title is arguably clever mI took my first flight in over a year on the first federal holiday of Juneteenth. This book was the perfect short read. The title is arguably clever marketing (it worked on me!) since the book itself only uses a discussion of Juneteenth itself as a relatively brief bookend to the meat of the book which is a set of essays and meditations the blend history, memoir and little bit of current events to tell the story of Texas, and especially the story of Black people in Texas. The essays each work individually but they also fit together nicely as a collective whole.
The essays explore the identity of Texas (often thought of as the land of cowboys and oilmen, but Annette Gordon-Reed points out it was also the land of plantation slavery), its history (including the lynchings and extrajudicial murders in her town and looking at familiar events like the Alamo from unfamiliar angles like the problematic backgrounds of the protagonists and the enslaved people there), her own experiences there (in white schools, her mother's teaching, going to the Six Flags Over Texas amusement park), and--yes--Juneteenth itself.
Gordon-Reed's love for history comes through most clearly, her understanding that the past is the past and should be understood on its own terms--but that it also reverberates through to the present. She makes few quick moral judgments (even where they are more than amply warranted) and does a good job illuminating the complexity of the past. Ultimately he own story is part of that complexity--a Black woman who grew up in Texas, understands its horrors but loves it for all her childhood memories, now a University Professor at Harvard and living in New York City.
The relatively slim book felt like an appetizer that left me hungry for much more while not adequately resolving anything. In other ways, it was an argument that it could not be adequately resolved but instead we should see history through different people's eyes, including the canonical events but also how different people saw and were engaged in those events (e.g., her extensive work on Sally Hemings, her family and Jefferson)....more
Every time I saw this in the bookstore I was skeptical because I was afraid that George Takei was trading on his celebrity. But I finally gave in becaEvery time I saw this in the bookstore I was skeptical because I was afraid that George Takei was trading on his celebrity. But I finally gave in because I had read all the other graphic novels on my rising eighth grade daughter's school's summer reading list (a list that including the outstanding On a Sunbeam and March: Book One). As a bit of a completist I decided I should read this one too, plus graphic novels don't take very long. And it was excellent!
The incarceration of Japanese Americans in World War II (the term Takei prefers instead of the more usual "internment") is well known as a shameful episode in our history. But I had never read anything in detail about it and certainly not tried to understand the experience for people that lived through it. Takei was four when the U.S. military gave his family 10 minutes to leave their Los Angeles home and then spent the next four years being moved from camp to camp, leaving the world of barbed wire when he turned eight.
The book gives a child's eye view of these events, at times scary but more often just feeling normal because it was all he knew. It also portrays the different choices made by different prisoners: some enlisted in the army, some signed loyalty oaths, others conscientiously refused (including Takei's father), and ultimately many of them were pressured into giving up their U.S. citizenship entirely (including Takei's mother).
In addition to being a vivid portrait of a historical experience Takei addresses how that historical experience does and does not resonate down with history. He shows how Ronald Reagan signed a law honoring the former prisoners and paying them restitution speaking in soaring terms of the shame of what America had done and honoring the Japanese-Americans for their contributions, Bill Clinton did further honors for combat veterans saying the United States got more than it deserved, and the American legal system often provided refuge and support, especially after the war. But Takei is not just sugar coating America's ability to improve, he ends on the Muslim ban and current immigration policies--seeing an echo of the incarceration of Japanese Americans and the attitudes that went into it in these policies today.
Definitely worth the short time it takes to read this book that illuminates with depth and sensitivity an important episode in American history that is not overlooked (people know it) but still underappreciated....more
This was two books in one: a pretty good memoir about aspects of life as an undocumented child of undocumented parents and set of portraits of undocumThis was two books in one: a pretty good memoir about aspects of life as an undocumented child of undocumented parents and set of portraits of undocumented Americans that are worth reading but less three dimensional than the author's stated aspirations.
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio starts out angry at the thought anyone would even ask her to write a memoir, "A memoir? I was twenty-one. I wasn't fucking Barbara Streisand" I had been writing professionally since I was fifteen, but only about music--I wanted to be the guy in High Fidelity--and I didn't want my first book to be a rueful tale about being a sickly Victorian orphan with tuberculosis who didn't have a Social Security number, which is what the agents all wanted." She then says she is going to set out to portray a set of undocumented Americans without burdening them with representation, instead portraying them as they are, including "warm, funny, dry, evasive, philosophical, weird, annoying, etc." I absolutely loved this introduction, it was what got me to read the book, and set a standard that also left me somewhat disappointed.
A lot of the book is indeed a memoir and a very good one. Cornejo Villavicencio's father comes across as every adjective above and more as he goes from a job as a taxi driver to delivery (where is he called a "delivery boy" even though he is a man) to restaurants. Her mother initially didn't work but has a bit of a feminist reawakening when she starts to work. And Cornejo Villavicencio herself never gets tuberculosis but struggles with migraines while her father has a prostate cancer scare and all of this is impacted by being undocumented in America. Finally, her younger brother was born in the United States making him a citizen and eligible to sponsor the others when he turns 21, although he is less of a character in the book.
The memoir content is interspersed around the journalism as Cornejo Villavicencio spends countless hours with different undocumented Americans, like day laborers in New York City and people getting asylum in Cleveland. In many ways the variety of places and people appear intended to be representational of undocumented immigrants--despite her protest otherwise in the introduction. And that really does lead to the problem she was trying to avoid, flattening them, making them types, representatives and victims of all of America's injustices. In some cases, they may be very realistic types, but in some ways not (only a couple dozen people are living in asylum in churches and she tells us about a thousand undocumented day laborers in New York, so those stories are interested but actually don't seem representative).
Finally, there is virtually nothing positive in the portraits and interactions in America. Maybe that is fair and true but one has the suspicion that amidst the genuine outrages in places like Flint (which she depicts), there genuinely are a lot of old-fashioned opportunities in America--of which someone like the author, a woman that graduated from Harvard and is now getting a Ph.D. from Yale--would actually be a good example of.
P.S. I listened to Cornejo Villavicencio's excellent narration of the audio book. ...more
As I was reading this book I couldn’t help but think I was reading an excellent narrative journalistic account of the paper Hsieh et al published in EAs I was reading this book I couldn’t help but think I was reading an excellent narrative journalistic account of the paper Hsieh et al published in Econometrica in 2019 finding that 20 to 40 percent of productivity growth in the half century following 1960 was due to “improved allocation of talent” as barriers to women, people of color and others were reduced—although not eliminated. Then halfway through the book Jim Tankersley takes a brief hiatus from narrative journalism to do an economics literature review—and begins it with this Hsieh et al paper. Which is to say, there his a lot of cutting edge economics and research underlying the moving and powerful stories Tankersley tells in the book.
Tankersley argues provocatively but persuasively that journalists have not neglected the white men that voted for Trump but in fact lavished attention on them, including the workers that Tankersley himself had quoted in his news stories. Instead it is women, minorities and immigrants who Tankersley argues have not been heard from enough—and who played a critical role in building the middle class and fueling American economic growth. Tankersley tells the story largely by drawing on his own reporting over the last fifteen years which takes places all across the country: New York, Chicago, Ohio, Winston-Salem, and Western Massachusetts among other places. He is interested in the jobs that have disappeared, the hollowing out of manufacturing and the middle class, and way obstacles were reduced in the 1950s and 1960s but then inequality emerged and grew as a major obstacle in recent decades.
I mostly agree with Tankersley’s arguments. I appreciated that for a book that focuses on inclusion and distribution, he appreciates and clearly shows the importance of aggregate productivity growth and the sources of that growth—both the obvious ones and the less obvious ones. At times Tankersley takes all of the most negative perspectives on his data without qualification/nuance (e.g., he’ll use statistics about record low job growth without pointing out how different today’s demographics are and does not mention that the negative growth of median income in various periods he cites was not true if you adjust for household size). I also think the book emphasized institutional explanations for inequality more but did not take the race between education and technology nearly as seriously—reducing it more to skill-biased technological change without the educational component. Finally, and this is more tone than anything, I didn’t love the identification of every economist by their race/gender, even on multi-authored papers and often Tankersley refers to the “economy” as if it had agency and its own villainy as opposed to be composed of all of us. Finally, I would have loved to hear more about the relationship between “economic” and “cultural” explanations of populism and Tankersley’s views, in particular, on the cultural debates around immigration.
All in all, however, the book demonstrates what happens when an intelligent, sympathetic journalist goes out and talks to both human beings and economists and does an excellent combination of the two in forging a powerful and important narrative about what went right and now wrong with the American economy and the real human consequences of these aggregates....more
An account of the aftermath of the closing of GM's plant in Janesville Wisconsin told through the stories of a variety of people, including a worker, An account of the aftermath of the closing of GM's plant in Janesville Wisconsin told through the stories of a variety of people, including a worker, the head of a training office, a teacher, a local banker, and more. Janesville is well told, moving chronologically to portray many different facets of the community, the different ways that different segments responded, and the few triumphs and some tragedies--one particularly poignant.
Although it is not a policy book, Amy. Goldstein does present her views at various stages, more about what not to do than what to do. She is very negative on community college and training programs, arguing that they train people for jobs that do not exist. The community college view seems more negative than the evidence warrants. The portrayal of the way already strapped states and communities bid for corporations makes your blood boil and wish for a European-style system that would ban this form of mutually inefficient competition. The image of how the social safety net gets devastated by the decline of charitable giving after a place is hit, compounding the problems, is painful--especially for the fact that public policy could easily solve it. But the fundamental problem of how to restore jobs or prepare people for other jobs is one that I still one that does not have a full satisfactory answer....more
Wow, what a stunning book. As I read it I felt completely immersed in the seedy Boston underworld of the 1970s and 1980s and their corrupt relationshiWow, what a stunning book. As I read it I felt completely immersed in the seedy Boston underworld of the 1970s and 1980s and their corrupt relationship of gangsters and the FBI, whenever the present interrupted it took a moment to adjust back to it.
I was initially skeptical that I would want this much detail on something where I knew the general arc of the story (FBI gets Whitey Bulger as an informant, protects him in exchange, eventually it all comes to light, he flees, and they eventually track him down). Boy was I wrong: each and every detail was fascinating in its own right. At times it read like a thriller. But even more impressive is how it portrays the evolution of the four main characters: John Connolly the FBI agent who grew up with Whitey Bulger in Southie and protected him mostly as a result of boyhood feelings and the glamour associated a charismatic local boy; John Morris another FBI agent who was drawn into petty corruption, a few thousand dollars here and there, and only eventually rose above it; Steve Flemmi a brutal mobster at the intersection of the Irish and Italian gangs who actually did more informing than Bulger; and finally Whitey Bulger who is portrayed not as a "good bad guy" but someone who pushes drugs and murders women.
The authors did an impressive job pulling together an authoritative account with an enormous amount of detail--much of it relying on the extensive detail uncovered and documented by a series of Federal judges. We learn more about Morris's and Flemmi's thinking because they both testified extensively while Connolly and Bulger are a little more distant which is a shame but not something the authors could remedy (and in the case of one of them, can never be remedied)....more
Coco, Jessica, Mercedes, Serena, George, Cesar, Lourdes. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc does an amazing job bringing all of them--and dozens more--to life in tCoco, Jessica, Mercedes, Serena, George, Cesar, Lourdes. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc does an amazing job bringing all of them--and dozens more--to life in this nonfiction account of growing up in the Bronx in the 1980s and 1990s. Written in extraordinary detail, sometimes mind numbing but that is partly the point, it often seems like a more rich and detailed account of their lives than I could possibly remember of what I did last week or the week before. The book begins in media res and ends abruptly, presumably more dictated by the author's writing schedule than any natural ending to the story--and it being real life there is no natural end to the story because it is not a story.
I appreciated that the book was written with no editorial commentary, no attempts to draw larger lessons, almost no links to the broader debates and changes going on at the time--except to the degree they were directly perceived and affected the participants (e.g., the work requirements in welfare reform). All of that made everything much more credible than if the author had an offer perspective. And, in fact, some of it is more complicated than one might think.
Even absent editorial commentary, many of the injustices of the system are completely apparent and it would take a hard hearted reader not to react with anger. At times I was uncomfortable being a voyeur, unsure if everyone wanted to be depicted in this way, and found the absence of the author in some ways odd--she describes every detail of Coco's day and everyone in her apartment, for example, except presumably for the several hours she spent talking to the author. And was she trying to help or just observing? No great answers to these questions and I certainly will not be the one to judge from a huge distance. But I admit to wondering.
This is one of the must reads of the last quarter century, I had been told to read it repeatedly but only finally got around to it. It is long, but every page is gripping and if there were another 500 or 1,000 pages covering the next 19 years I would read that immediately as well....more
Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Among the best narrative nonfiction books I have ever read, perhaps the best. Common Ground is very long (I mostly listened bWow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Among the best narrative nonfiction books I have ever read, perhaps the best. Common Ground is very long (I mostly listened but partly read it over the course of two months), but I would not have parted with a page of it. Sometimes you get the point of a book quickly but it has lots of padding. The point of this book was how complex race relations in general, and busing in particular, were in the 1960s and 1970s in Boston. Establishing and understanding that point took inhabiting the minds of several different characters from several perspectives and watching them change over the course of a decade. Moreover, every time Anthony Lukas introduces anything new he goes back to its origins and full history, making the mini histories of Irish, Black Bostonians, the Great Migration, The Boston Globe, the Charlestown high school, Judge Garrity, The Boston Globe, etc. etc. etc. each incredibly interesting in its own right and an important part of the overall story.
The book centers around three families: a Black family in Dorchester who have children that are bused to school in Charlestown, a working class Irish family in Charlestown that protests against busing but the daughter comes around to be more supportive of it, and a liberal lawyer/political aide/law professor that moves to the South End but gets increasingly concerned about crime, becomes a semi-vigilante, and eventually leaves for the suburbs. Lukas shows each of them, portrays them with sympathy, in stories that are heartbreaking, suspenseful, moving and painful (OK, I had a synonym for that already but it deserved to be said twice). Much of it seems like history at this point but too much of it is still too present as well.
I appreciated that Lukas had essentially no editorial interjections, no perspective that I could discern, just a narrative that the author was sharing to help readers make up their own minds--or unmake up their minds....more
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