by Marylaine Block
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by Marylaine Block
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note: if you want to get your hands on any of these books, and they're out of print, click hereEllen Alderman and Caroline Kennedy. The Right To Privacy. This book tells the personal stories of outrage behind the court cases which defined the right of privacy for Americans. Very interesting, and very scary. Also see their earlier book, In Our Defense, which details some of the stories behind court cases that helped define the meaning of the first ten amendments to the constitution. Books about History
Stephen Ambrose. Undaunted Courage. Easily one of the greatest true adventure stories of all time, this is a detailed chronicle of the Lewis and Clark expedition. That these men could go through an uncharted and hostile landscape, inhabited by grizzlies and unfriendly Indians, and arrive safely back having lost only one member of the expedition is a tribute to the leadership of Lewis and Clark, and to the human capacity for endurance. More importantly, they also brought back with them a wealth of knowledge, maps of the plains and rivers and mountains, sketches of the wildlife, detailed accounts of the tribes they encountered, a basis for all further exploration and settlement of the west. Ambrose is a good scholar, and a great storyteller.
Melba Patillo Beals. Warriors Don't Cry. Melba Patillo Beals was one of the teenagers who integrated Central High School in 1957. She tells about this scarring experience here. It's hard for most of us, I think, to imagine the hatred, and the sheer meanness of the white southerners who fought integration bitterly, with no holds barred. Students, parents, even teachers, would hurl insults and rocks as these black teenagers arrived at the school. Inside the school, responsible adults would do nothing to protect them, as white students pushed these children, shoved them, verbally abused them, ostracized them, threatened them, and beat them up. When one of the students fought back, he was expelled for bad behavior. At home, there was no rest, because of the constant phone calls, with vicious racial slurs, death threats and bomb threats. Even their own people were not entirely supportive; many in the black community preferred to endure segregation because they feared stirring up white passions. This book is a useful reminder of how badly racism allows us to behave.
Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn. 102 Minutes. The story of the last moments of the twin towers and the people inside them. Using hundreds of interviews and taped telephone calls from people inside the WTC before its collapse, the book tells about the many acts of heroism that saved lives and the numerous screwups that cost them during the minutes between the first plane hitting and the second tower's fall.
History Wars. A collection of readings about the ill-fated Enola Gay exhibition at the Air and Space Museum, which became a cause celebre of the right. The intention was to show the plane that dropped the atom bomb as the end of one era and the beginning of the nuclear era--which gave the Enola Gay a moral ambiguity that did not sit well with men who fought in World War II. They wanted to have the dropping of the bomb seen as uncontestable victory, revenge on the Japanese who attacked Pearl Harbor, and a necessary act that saved the lives of American servicemen, and did not wish to have any of that clouded up with scholarship that suggested the bombing might not have been necessary, or with images of the civilians who died in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's a cautionary tale for any historians, librarians, or museums that are repositiories of important cultural symbols, about the dangers of messing with cultural myth. Most librarians and scholars and curators are totally unprepared to find their work attacked and used for political purposes.
James Loewen. Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong. The problem with historical markers, is that pretty much anybody, with any agenda, can put them up, and there's two kinds of history involved: the history being recorded, and the history and goals of the people who put the markers up. Talks about Sasha and zamani: sasha, history that people who lived through it are still alive to tell about, and zamani, history by remote descendants who use it and shape it to their purposes. What he finds on the landscape is tributes to racism and conquest; what he doesn't find is acknowledgement of our errors, injustices, and crimes. Also see his book Lies My Teacher Taught Me, reviewed under Books about Teaching.
Alexander Stille. The Future of the Past. In a series of intriguing true stories, Stille explains the fundamental paradox of our times: that we have unearthed and discovered so much of the world's history and knowledge just in time to face the possibility -- even likelihood -- of its disappearance. For instance, Egypt struggles to restore and/or protect its antiquities as they are steadily assaulted by smog, relentless urban expansion, and the moisture and carbon dioxide from the breath of tourists who want to view the treasures; in Madagascar, people who wish to protect the rain forest and its endangered inhabitants threaten the survival of the poverty-stricken people who are no longer allowed to seek food in the forests. Lots of other fascinating stories.
William Zinsser. American Places. One I recommend for Americans and vistors alike--Americans because we teach and learn our history so poorly, and the rest of the world because this is such a wonderful distillation of the best things about us as a nation. Zinsser explores all the obvious places, of course--the Alamo, Mount Vernon, Mount Rushmore, etc.--and not with just the standard tour guide blah blah blah. Zinsser gives a wonderful sense of place and history, and shows you how the mythology evolved around these places. But he takes you to some unexpected places as well. His chaper on the Civil Rights Memorial is not only a powerful piece about the civil rights struggle and the Southern Poverty Law Center, but it is also a wonderful story about how a sculptor, Maya Lin, thinks about her art and her goal as she creates a monument, and about how her work interacts with its audience.
Some Books on September 11:
Steven Brill. After. Brill chose about 47 people to follow through the year after September 11: members of victims' families, the owner of a small business near the World Trade Center, New York Senator Charles Schumer, the head of the Red Cross, members of the Customs Service, the CEO of the swiftly put-together September 11 fund, Tom Ridge, the president of an insurance company, members of the newly formed Transportation Security Administration, a recovery supervisor at ground zero, a Border Patrol agent, the administrator of the Victim Compensation Fund, the defense attorney for John Walker Lindh, among others. Through their stories, he shows the human needs of survivors and a terrified public, and the ways that institutions succeeded or failed in meeting them.
Jim DeFede. The Day the World Came to Town. On September 11, when American airspace was shut down, transatlantic flights were ordered to land at the nearest available airport, which for many of them was Gander, Newfoundland, and a town of 2000 people was called on at short notice to host 6000 passengers and crew. The speed and thoughtfulness with which they organized to make these people welcome is a heart-warming story.
Jere Longman. Among the Heroes. Reconstructs what happened aboard Flight 93 and tells us about the lives of the passengers who stormed the cockpit.
Gail Sheehy. Middletown, America. Middletown, NJ, lost over 50 residents on September 11. A suburb without any real community, it's not well organized to deal with crisis, and the suddenly widowed are people more used to giving charity than accepting help from strangers. Yet they've been insulated by money, and now have to deal with bills that keep on coming in while employers cut off the money. Sheehy follows several of the widows, rescue workers, ministers, and community leaders for the two years after Sept. 11, chronicling how they deal with the disaster, rebuild their lives, and try to find meaning in what happened.
The Art of Fact. A terrific anthology of literary journalism, from Daniel Defoe up through the present, including selections from Jack London, Stephen Crane, John Hersey, Tracy Kidder, Bob Greene, George Orwell, Rebecca West. Really memorable pieces, John McPhee, "From the Pine Barrens," Bill Buford, "Among the Thugs," Michael Herr, "Dispatches," George Orwell, "Marrakech," Lawrence Otis Graham on Harlem, Tom Wolfe, "The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test." Books about Journalism and Other Media Issues
Stephen Bates. If No News, Send Rumors. A collection of some of the most interesting and amusing folklore of ournalism--the stories reporters tell each other about their trade. A lot of fun.
Jan Henry Brunvand. His field is the so-called "urban legend"--stories that pop up all over the country, often appearing in newspapers as well, but usually told as happening to a "friend of a friend", or FOAF. The stories have a surface plausibility, and are nourished by certain societal fears and assumptions--stories like being roasted in a tanning salon, and such. He runs a regular column, and has published a number of books: The Choking Doberman, Curses, Broiled Again!, The Vanishing Hitchhiker, and several others. There is an official Urban Legends Archive.
Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon. Adventures in Medialand. A necessary antidote to anyone who believes the media has a liberal bias. The authors provide overwhelming evidence that the bias of the press is in fact the bias of white, middle-class, establishment journalists--anti-union, anti-affirmative action, anti-extremes on either side.
Cynthia Crossen. Tainted Truth: the Manipulation of Fact in America. About all the ways in which research and statistics are manufactured to order, or misreported, ranging from polls to advertising to industry-sponsored research to courtroom expert testimony.
James Fallows. Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy. Fallows makes the case that 1) the elite journalists feel that saying anything good about public officials makes them suspect and puts them at risk of being proved wrong; 2) journalists who want to be Woodward and Bernstein actively seek scandal, and ignore the day-to-day work of government; 3) journalists start with their own unconscious assumptions (such as, that bureaucrats by definition do dumb things), and all information is then filtered through those assumptions; and 4) journalists feel that their job is to provide context and analysis, rather than to "transcribe" the words of public officials--which means, effectively, that the 7- second soundbytes we are now allowed to hear of political speeches are framed between two sneers.
Barry Glassner. The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things. Mainly because reporters sensationalize events all out of proportion to their likelihood. Quite an indictment of journalism.
Gary Gumpert. Talking Tombstones and Other Tales of the Media Age. Fascinating essays about how new media technologies change our lives. Radios, for instance, which, as he shows, can be used with earphones to create a private environment amid crowds, or as a ghetto blaster to assault other people's personal space. Very interesting.
Pete Hamill. News Is a Verb. About everything journalism should be and is ceasing to be. How it has lost touch with its community, ceased to be the zocale. How it has come to be about celebrity rather than about events. How it has lost the attention of women. How it has ceased to tell people about the city they live in.
John Hockenberry. Moving Violations. Radio and TV journalist Hockenberry talks about the adjustments he made to life as a paraplegic, his rebellions, his ferocious insistence on doing what he had done before, and his eventual acceptance that sometimes he would have to ask for help, as when he was a reporter in the middle east, where ramps and elevators are uncommon. Interesting stories of the unbelievable rudeness and expressed curiosity of strangers (a flight attendant asking him if he hadn't considered killing himself). And of times when he overreached himself, like traveling by camel through Iraq with the Kurds being driven into Turkish area (and driven back by the Turks)-in such grossly unsanitary conditions, when he can only pee by catheter, his approach was semi-starvation; no input, no output. This was an expedition he could not have survived without assistance. Discusses the accidents that led to his NPR career by way of the Mt St. Helens eruption.
Steven Johnson. Everything Bad Is Good for You. Argues that with Tivo, DVDs and VCRs, entertainment has become repeatable, and therefore now rewards complexity that enriches the story with repetitive viewings, just as video games reward players for perseverance in working out their own strategies and solutions rather than following clearly set rules and paths. He argues that entertainment is now cultivating thinking skills undreamed of in the past.
Howard Kurtz. Media Circus. Kurtz is a regular reporter on ethical issues in journalism for the Washington Post. This collection of his columns raises questions on everything from objectivity to conflicts of interest to inside-the-beltway political coverage that fails to inform voters. Kurtz writes well, and addresses most of the things that major news media do that drive us ordinary people crazy. His other book, Hot Air is about the rise of talk show culture, and its impact on policy and legislation.
Thomas Patterson. Out of Order. Traces the decline of presidential campaign reporting. He thinks the "reforms" of the late 1960's, that transferred the candidate selection process from the parties to state primaries drastically weakened the authority of the parties and their ability to define the campaign's issues, allowing the reporters to become the de facto deciders of which candidates should be taken seriously, and to choose their own issues, rather than the candidates', to report on. He discusses the increasingly short shrift candidates' actual words are given, and the extent to which the candidates' words are inserted inside a cynical putdown by the network correspondent. A valuable piece of analysis.
Caryl Rivers. Slick Spins and Fractured Facts. Should be read along with Susan Faludi's book Backlash; both books examine the incorrect cultural assumptions of the middle-aged white men who dominate journalism that lead to false reporting, particularly where issues of gender, class and race are concerned. She's outraged, but she's also funny.
Nan Robertson. The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men and the New York Times Robertson tells the story of the painful struggle of women to be hired by, then treated as equals by, the New York Times. With the exception of the period when Eleanor Roosevelt refused to grant press interviews to any but female reporters, the Times didn't much bother themselves with women at all. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act they were forced to hire women, but not necessarily to treat them as they would any promising male employees. Ultimately it took a court case to force the Times into the 20th century. And the women who fought, and won, the good fight, all mysteriously disappeared from the Times and were forgotten even by the later women whose careers at the Times were made possible by their struggles.
Tom Rosenstiel. Strange Bedfellows: How Television and the Presidential Candidates Changed American Politics, 1992. This is a pretty compelling indictment of the way the press does business during a presidential campaign. Every election, the amount of unmediated time the candidates get to be seen on the air talking gets shorter, and the amount of time spent quoting poll results and detailing campaign strategy gets longer. What does not get discussed at any length are the issues either the candidates or the public are concerned about. This is a powerful book about an important topic, and does much to explain public disaffection with journalism as it is practiced today.
Larry Sabato.Feeding Frenzy. One of the earliest great books of media criticism. Sabato deals with the press as pack of mad dogs, all pursuing the same scent, all totally unconcerned with a)the feelings of their human quarry, b) truth, or c) objectivity. He also points out that one of the consequences of pack journalism is the number of important stories that get totally ignored and unreported in the process.
Leslie Savan. The Sponsored Life. A collection of her columns for the Village Voice from the late 80's critiquing advertising, both in terms of the purpose and success of infividual campaigns and in terms of their effects on us. Savan is witty and insightful and a lot of fun to read.
Danny Schechter. The More You Watch, the Less You Know. Schechter brings an unusual perspective as both media insider and outsider. He has been a journalist on a left-of-center radio station in Boston and a journalist on Prime Time Live, but he has also been an independent producer in South Africa, trying to bring the story of the struggle against apartheid to the American people against the solid resistance of don't-rock-the-boat establishment-minded network and public television executives.
John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton. Toxic Sludge Is Good for You. This is a must read for anyone who thinks public relations is a harmless sort of business. Because when any business is doing awful things to the environment, or to consumers or employees, it mounts an intensely sophisticated public relations campaign. When any country is torturing and murdering its citizens, it mounts a public relations campaign to convince American legislators that it's nothing the United States government should worry about. The P.R. people start wining and dining legislators and prominent journalists, especially the ones who frequent the Sunday talk shows. They offer their own statistics and research data to congressional committees, along with expert witnesses. They sponsor expensive advertising campaigns to sway public opinion--think of the "Harry and Louise" campaign against the Clinton health care reform proposal. The big P.R. firms are able to create public policy, and drown out the opposition, because the people who work for these firms are themselves Washington insiders--former congressmen and cabinet members--and because they routinely contribute to and work for political candidates. This is a really scary, important book.
James Twitchell. Ad Cult. Twitchell makes a convincing case that advertising is not just part of our culture--it IS our culture, infecting everything from television to sports to high culture, which is sponsored and co-opted by advertising (Orkin sponsoring a museum show on bus, etc.).
Anne Lamott. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Lamott is a good writer and a great teacher. Here she talks with wit and style about how to write, how to sharpen your language and images, how to ward off the evil voices that tell you that you cannot succeed. She has a gift for language, not only her own, but others', and her book is full of quotes perfectly chosen to help you think. Books about Language and Mind
Bill Bryson. Made in America is intended as a study in the development of our racy, inventive, colorful American version of the English language. But along the way it gives as entertaining and enlightening an account of American history and culture as you are likely to get anywhere. I also recommend Bryson's earlier book, The Mother Tongue, about the history and spread of the English language. It's funny, correct, anecdote-filled, and beats the heck out of the dreary little textbook I used when I took a course in the history of the English language lo these many moons ago.
Winifred Gallagher. The Power of Place. She makes a compelling case that our environment (geophysical, climate, human), from the womb on up, shapes our personalities and the way we view the world.
Daniel Gilbert. Stumbling on Happiness. We may be the only species that can plan for future happiness, but our mind's errors keep us from making good predictions about what will please us in the future. Psychologist Gilbert is just the kind of author you want for explaining something complicated, because he both entertains and explains well.
Jane M. Healy. Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect our Children's Minds, for Better and Worse. Children raised on computers exhibit some strange behavior patterns-they are asocial, bright, insensitive, lost in physical space, because they have been deprived of so many normal building blocks of the senses by sitting in front of a computer when they should be playing, fighting, negotiating. There are more than 5 senses, and these other senses are developed in the course of running and jumping and exploring.
Jack Hitt, ed. In a Word. A Harper's book about words that should exist but don't, submitted by a wide variety of writers. which I've ambled along with, a page or two at a time. There are some wonderfully useful words here. I'm especially fond of (and experienced with) kintinnabulation, and one of these days I'm going to write a column about plotto: our need to address public matters in terms of storytelling. Did you catch the Roger Rosenblatt letter to 2100 in Time? One of his sentences I liked was "We are members of a narrative species, you and I." I also was quite fond of nontendo, which is what I figure I really am, and muchismo, drivulet, dronage and onedownmanship. George W. and Steve Forbes, of course, are heirheads.
Ellen J. Langer. Mindfulness. About how we get trapped by categories, prejudices, "premature commitment" to ideas, and to the extent that we live by these assumptions and are not fully mindful, we literally let go of big chunks of life. She has done a lot of experiments with the elderly, and it's clear that the more control they have over their environment, and the more complex the environment so that they have to think about it, the more likely they are to not give up on life.
Richard Lederer. Anguished English. Also, More Anguished English. Lederer collects all sorts of funny errors in English usage--advertising copy errors ("We do not tear your clothes with machinery. We do it carefully by hand."), student bloopers ("the difference between a king and a president is that a king is the son of his father but a president isn't"), news headlines ("MAN EATING PIRANHA MISTAKENLY SOLD AS FISH"), and more. You could also visit his online column, Verbivore
Derek Nelson. Off the Map: the Curious Histories of Place Names. A fascinating little book which begins with the politics of maps-the fact that mapmakers have to make many different versions of maps, in which places are named different things to meet local preferences (like Israel being obliterated, and replaced by Occupied Territory on Jordanian maps), and even boundaries being differently drawn. Other sections deal with the evolution of maps and the names assigned to them.
Steven Pinker. The Language Instinct. Pinker makes a convincing argument that the human mind is genetically programmed to deduce complex grammar, and hence meaning, from the limited language input babies are given. Like most linguists, he cites Noam Chonsky and other scholarly sources to prove his point. Unlike them, he also cites Dave Barry and Dr. Seuss. This is fascinating. I guess I'd have to admit that it's a mite on the heavy side, and putdownable, though.
David Sedaris. Me Talk Pretty One Day. A collection of essays, many of them about language, starting with his adventures with the pretty young speech therapist who tried to cure him of his lisp, and going on to his adventures living in France knowing nothing of the language except a few nouns, and with a French teacher who despises him. He writes well.
Lisa Belkin. First, Do No Harm. Belkin spent a lot of time with the doctors and ethics committee at a Houston hospital, following some of the patients who caused the most agonizing about the ethics of keeping them alive Books about Medicine and Medical Ethics
Laurie Garret. The Coming Plague is a very scary book about all the new viruses and microbes that "progress" is exposing us to; scarier still, those viruses are out-adapting us and rendering our entire arsenal of drugs and antibiotics useless. But oddly enough, this book is a testimony to the importance of government. As she tells about Ebola and the other African viruses, you see the constant frustration of the researchers and doctors, trying to get there in the first place, where there are no decent roads, trying to keep blood samples and rugs refrigerated, where there is no electricity, trying to prevent water-borne disease where there are no water-purification systems. It's a real downer of a book, but one I wish our senators and representatives would read before they try again to cut the budget for the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control again.
Atul Gawande. Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science. Talks about why mistakes are normal in medicine, how even now, with all our improved diagnostic tests, 40% of diagnoses are found on autopsies to be wrong. Explains the necessity of giving young doctors a chance to learn, even though it may be rough on their patients until they've achieved mastery.
Jerome Groopman, MD. Second Opinions. Several detailed case descriptions of people who chose to get a second opinion on a critical medical decision, often despite the determined resistance and anger of their original doctor. Groopman was one of those cases, fighting for his son's life against two doctors, neither of whom really listened to what he and his wife, also a physician, observed; had they waited until morning, as the second doctor wished, their son would have died.
Sharon R. Kaufman. And a Time To Die: How American Hospitals Shape the End of Life.. Explains just how little care of the dying in hospitals is dictated by their needs and their living wills, and how much is dictated by the requirements of the economic and legal constraints hospitals must operate within. If you think you've covered your bases with a living will, uyou need to read this book.
Perri Klass. Baby Doctor. Klass is a pediatrician who has written extensively about the brutal training process doctors are put through, and how it often costs them their humanity. This is a collection of some of those essays. Perri Klass is a doctor who never stops seeing her child patients as real people, children in need.
Harold Klawans. Death and In Between. One of the country's outstanding neurologists talks about medical ethics and decisionmaking. As outstanding a writer as he is a doctor, he understands his patients as people, not just medical conditions. If you like this one, you'll want to seek out several other books he's written; his stories about his patients will remind you of Oliver Sacks' books.
Robert Marion. The Boy Who Felt No Pain. True stories of badly damaged children, told by a gifted and caring pediatrician.
Maryn McKenna. Beating Back the Devil: on the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service. Follows the first post-9/11 class of disease detectives through their training and first year of duty, as they confront medical mysteries including outbreaks of antibiotic-resistant TB, listeriosis, malaria, drug-resistant staph, etc.
Marion Nestle. What To Eat. An aisle by aisle guide to the American grocery store, the food claims and truths in each food group, and the politics and economics behind each product and claim.
Sherwin Nuland. How We Die. Which is to say, the part of medicine that doctors really don't want to deal with. Since their job is to heal people, death is the ultimate defeat. Perhaps that's why so many doctors spend so much effort prolonging the lives of comatose, pain-wracked, dying people. Nuland talks a lot about the doctors and their decisions, and how their patients feel about those decisions, with specific reference to several major killers of the elderly--Alzheimer's, cancer, heart disease, etc. This is a book all doctors should read, but patients will appreciate it a great deal.
Oliver Sacks. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. A neurologist's stories of people with bizarre and baffling neurological conditions, like a man with Tourette's Syndrome, and a man who couldn't remember names of things, and a man who lost all sense of where his body was in space. Good medicine, and even better storytelling.
Robert Stinson. The Long Dying of Baby Andrew. A true story all doctors should read. Stinson tells about his son Andrew, born four months too soon, and the determination of his doctors to save him without regard to the pain inflicted upon him in the process (every bone in the child's body was fractured at least once during his short seven months of life). In their singleminded devotion to saving life, the doctors paid no attention to the possible costs to baby Andrew in terms of permanent brain damage, or to the financial and emotional costs to his family.
Geoffrey Canada. Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun. This is Canada's account of growing up in a dangerous inner city; as a man, he returned to the city to work with inner city youth to give them a better vision of a possible future, and a better model of how men can and should behave. Books on Race
Ellis Cose. The Rage of a Privileged Class. Ellis Cose is a middle class black man, a well-known and respected journalist and author. White people don't understand why he should be angry about racism in America--after all, he has it made, doesn't he? And racism doesn't exist anymore, does it? He shows here the depths of black anger at the racism that constantly takes away their dignity, that constantly reminds them that, whether you're a partner in a law firm or a successful entrepreneur or a journalist, you are nonetheless black, and therefore presumed to be poor, stupid, criminal, dangerous, or all of the above. This is a book all white people should read--and then examine their consciences. His new book, Color-Blind talks about the intractability of the problem of racism, not just in this country but worldwide. His discussions of race and color in Latin-America, where nearly everyone has some African ancestry, is particularly illuminating. Also on this point, read Living with Racism, by Joe Feagin and Melvin Sykes, and Lawrence Graham's Member of the Club (see below).
Lawrence Graham. Member of the Club. Another book about bearing the brunt of white racist attitudes. One chapter rates restaurants on the basis of whether they a) decline to serve you at all, b) seat you beside the kitchen, and whether their patrons a) mistake you for a waiter or a valet parking attendant, or b) refuse to sit in your vicinity, or c) threaten to report you to your presumed employer because you are using the phone they wish to use right this minute.
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot. Respect. As a black scholar, and the receiver of numerous slights both as a woman and a black, she is particularly conscious of the importance to all of us of being respected. Here she focuses on the work of a number of people for whom giving respect and attention is at the core of their work: Jenifer Dohrn, former radical, who has founded a midwifing center for the urban poor, Johnye Ballenger, a pediatrician among the urban poor who tries to teach young doctors to respect their patients, Kay Cottle, a gifted teacher, photographer Dawoud Bey, David Wilkins, a black law professor at harvard, and Bill Wallace, an Episcopal priest who ministers to AIDS patients.
Clarence Page. Showing My Color. In which he talks about the vagaraies of race and racism in this country. Talks about the suicide of his former wife, Leanita McClain. And, when asked whether he benefited from affirmative action, he says, sure-the riots of 1965 were damn good affirmative action as editors suddenly realized they needed people who could safely go into the ghettoes and report, and get people who would be willing to talk to them. An extended discussion of Malcolm X and Farrakhan, and the uses of anti-semitism in the movement. A nice discussion of the "middle man minorities" that urban blacks both depend on and mistrust. Also, a chapter on the rise of black conservatism. Very interesting book.David K. Shipler. A Country of Strangers. One of the best books I've ever read on the issue of race and racism. Though Shipler is a white man, he got black people to talk openly about their pain, their need for comfort in each other, about the burdens of mixed race, and their own color prejudices.
Studs Terkel. Race. Always a charged issue in America, race is something white Americans have never come to terms with. Here Studs Terkel, master interviewer and chronicler of the ideas of ordinary Americans, lets us hear ordinary Americans, white and black, speak honestly about their feelings about and experiences with people of other races. Very few people have Terkel's skill at getting people to speak honestly and openly. This is a valuable social document.
Steve Watkins. The Black O. A useful book for people who think there is no race discrimination in the workplace anymore, this tells about the Shoney restaurant chain, which practiced the most blatant racial discrimination--they would order franchisers to fire blacks and hire whites, they refused to allow blacks in public positions or management, and to make sure they didn't inadvertently do so, they marked all the application forms with a filled in O in Shoney's to indicate a black person. When managers would confront the company executives and say "but that's illegal," they would say "that's why we hire lawyers." It's quite a story, because the lawyer who was pursuing the case had very little money to work with, and he was fighting an uphill battle through the Reagan-packed courts. Interesting sidelight here was a discussion of what happened to the EEOC during Clarence Thomas' eight-year reign, incidentally--the number of judgments in favor of the complainants went down by a factor of about two-thirds. Anyway, it's very much a David and Goliath story, and you could hardly wait for this giant to fall down dead.
Vincent Barry. The Dog Ate My Homework. Takes us to task for how easily we excuse ourselves and others for our offenses. He captures all our glib excuses, and he will have none of them: playing dumb, shifting blame, the devil made me do it, it's legal, isn't it, the computer is down, it's not in my job description, and how was I supposed to know, anyway? This is no way, he says, for grownups to run a society. Hear, hear! Books about Social Issues
Bill Berkowitz. Local Heroes. Stories about people who do get involved, and change their communities, and even the nation. Includes Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels, Candy Lightner, founder of Mothers against Drunk Driving, and 18 others. There are nowhere near enough books that make you feel good about the human race, so read and cherish this one.
David W. Brown. When Strangers Cooperate: Using Social Conventions To Govern Ourselves is a very useful approach to the current crisis of legitimacy of government. People have become deeply distrustful and resentful of government--even people like me who understand how utterly dependent we are on government for personal safety, health, transport, and economic security. Our bureaucracies do indeed have far too many people who apply rules mindlessly, or who take petty pleasure in frustrating people, or who seek to usurp more power over people's lives. Meanwhile our Congress has become incapable of civilly discussing and trying to solve our problems. Indeed, they don't seem even to notice what our most pressing problems are. While most of our employers are trying to lay workers off, or replace permanent workers with temporary workers, and unions are powerless to protect our incomes and benefits, and real wages are going down, and few people are secure in their jobs, Congress is worrying about side issues and patting themselves on the back for it. So if government is not capable of dealing with out problems, we need to consider some other ways for mutually resolving them. Brown suggests that our normal social conventions may be a useful starting place. I hope a lot of people read this book.
Mark Nathan Cohn. Culture of Intolerance. A cultural anthropologist examines our certainties and ways of doing things and finds the underlying assumptions not only are not necessarily valid, but are also extremely odd in comparison with how other cultures do things. Makes mincemeat of the Bell Curve and our hatred for affirmative action, and makes clear that our assumptions have been used against us for the benefit of the rich and the corporations, none of whom will admit how much their wealth and privilege is owed to government and societal protections.
Charles Derber. The Wilding of America. Derber begins by talking about the tribe in Africa that is so stressed by a hostile environment that tribe members are totally selfish and predatory, making no attempt to work together, or even to protect their children. He sees many signs in our society that the predators are increasing and even being encouraged. His evidence is powerful, ranging from the bahvior of industrial leaders to juveniles. The book will shake you up.
Thomas Gabor. Everybody Does It: Crime by the Public. There is no criminal "type," says Gabor. In fact, virtually all of us do criminal acts at one time or another. The only differences are the frequency and seriousness of the acts, and the ways society views them when they are done by people like us.
David M. Gordon. Fat and Mean. Gordon argues that there are two ways companies can increase their profits. One is by reducing costs by cutting jobs and forcing down wages and benefits; the other is by iincreasing the value of workers by giving them decent salaries and benefits, which creates company loyalty, and extensive training, which makes them capable of coming up with better products and processes. He finds that American companies almost exclusively use the first method, which creates resentment and conflict, and wastes the human potential of employees, as well as creating dangerous economic insecurity.
Roberta Brandes Gratz and Norman Mintz. Cities back from the Edge: New Life for Downtown. More tales of inventive ways people have brought their downtowns back to life, centering often around some focal point, like a carousel in Mansfield, Ohio, old warehouses turned into lofts in Denver and many other cities, the public library and its adjoining park in NYC, and a newly redone Times Square, farmers' markets, riverfronts.
Jim Hightower. There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos. With his inimitable Texas drawl and wit, Hightower attacks corporate America and its hired politicians. (And here I thought I was the one who came up with the line "I don't need a third party; I just want there to be a second one." ) Think of him as a successor to Thomas Paine: deeply democratic, outraged at a bought and paid for congress, convinced that we can take our government back. All this and funny besides.
Philip Howard. The Death of Common Sense. A book which was picked up on and made famous by conservatives who missed a large part of Howard's point: government does unnecessarily stupid and costly things because it is too rule-bound and unsubject to common sense--but, it is that way because lawmakers have deliberately stripped government employees of the authority to make independent decisions
Wendy Kaminer. I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional. Kaminer skewers the self-help movement that has 12 step recovery programs for everything. She finds that the movement makes inadequate distinctions between serious and imagined victimization, that it is profoundly anti-rationalist, and that it insists on regarding all problems as personal problems rather than social ones--and it is profoundly beside the point to tell victims of racism to solve racism on a personal level. This is a witty and incisive look at a culture increasingly concerned with whining.
Jane Holtz Kay. Asphalt Nation. Outstanding book about the real costs of the automobile, economic, social, psychological. The figures on the amount of room a car consumes (since it has to be planned for at home, at work, and at shopping facilities) is staggering. She not only makes an excellent case for the return to rail and spur development, but also tells numerous stories of cities intelligently reclaiming the cities for human beings. Her account of techniques for traffic taming are very useful.
Erik Larson. Lethal Passage: How the Travels of a Single Handgun Expose the Roots of America's Gun Crisis. How was a 15 year old boy able to buy an automatic weapon and shoot up his school with it? This book discusses everything that went in to it: from the manufacturing of the American gun mystique (largely a product of Hollywood), the manufacturers, the dealers, the National Rifle Association, and the laws.
Bernard Lefkowitz. Our Guys. It explains how a group of well-off, suburban high school athletes came to commit gang-rape with a broomstick and baseball bat on a mentally retarded young girl, and how they and their families came to feel aggrieved when the boys were arrested and tried for the crime. It is a book about the complete failure of the adult world to teach bullies when they're still kids that their behavior is unacceptable and will not be tolerated, to keep them from growing up to be uncontrollable vicious thugs and rapists. See my column about this, Making Monsters. (See my column about this book, Making Monsters.)
Nicolaus Mills. The Triumph of Meanness: America's War against Its Better Self. The book crystallizes a lot of my problems with the fanatical right wing--the way it demonizes its enemies, is spiteful and vindictive toward even the working poor, and determined to wrest back every jot and tittle of racial advantage white people were used to having before affirmative action. But it's not just them--the meanness stretches to our reporters, who so often frame their news inside two sneers. It includes our corporate bosses who take pride in firing people and squeezing every last bit of salary and benefits from the ones that are left, to extract maximum profits for themselves and other stockholders.
Richard Moe and Carter Wilkie. Changing Places: Rebuilding Community in the Age of Sprawl. Beginning with the battle over Disney's planned American history theme park that would have destroyed genuine historical land, not so much by itself but by the traffic and sprawl that would follow it, this book traces various efforts individuals and historica preservation groups have done to convince civic leaders that old buildings can be recycled and used to create a "there" in the heart of their downtowns, and that they do not need to allow mindless development to tear the heart out of their cities.
Michael Moore. Downsize This! One of the funniest most impassioned calls for revoluton you will ever read. Moore, the director of Roger and Me, despises our corporate culture that puts massive profits above all other goals, that treats employees as disposable, and corrupts the laws designed to protect ordinary people. He despises the politicians who are bought, and the political system they have built to keep themselves in power. For all that, he believes deeply in the promises of our constitution, and believes that we can take back our government from its despoilers. An angry but hopeful book, that demands you get up off your butt and start doing something.
Edward Luttwak. The Endangered American Dream. He talks about the third-worldization of our economy, as, capital-poor, we drive down wages to become rich in cheap labor instead. As long as we fail to invest heavily in education, training and infrastructure, and we fail to protect our knowledge and research base, we will continue our economic downhill slide. Convincing and scary.
Michael Males. The Scapegoat Generation: America's War on Adolescents. Males makes an impressive case that our society is terrified of, and vindictive toward, its adolescents. We hysterically attack unwed teenage mothers, paying no attention to the (usually) adult males who made them pregnant; we attack kids for smoking, drugs, and alcohol abuse, while letting adults off the hook, even though adult use is what glamorizes the substances to kids. And often the attacks masquerade as concern for kids' well-being. This is a polemic, and he does repeat himself, but it's powerful anyway.
Marc Parent. Turning Stones. Parent, a cheerful, open Wisconsin boy, went to New York City and became an emergency child rescue worker. Working with children at risk, children whose parents were drunk or crazy or addicted or almost too stupid to live, the meanness of the world came home to him. At the same time, he began to feel good about himself as a caretaker, a saver of children--until he blew it and unknowingly allowed a child to die. This caused a crisis in his life, a crisis resolved in part by the words of Mother Teresa, who, when asked if she didn't feel it was futile to save just a few children amid so many who were dying, replied that she wasn't doing her work to change the world, but to keep the world from changing her. Words to live by, for those unthanked Sisyphuses, endlessly pushing society's stone uphill. This was a remarkable book.
William Rathje and Cullen Murphy. Rubbish! When's the last time you read a truly fascinating book about the trash civilization leaves behind? The authors, like the archaeologists before them who reconstructed previous civilizations by the broken potsherds left behind, analyze garbage dumps to find revealing things about our society. They also discuss the whole public issue of how to dispose of the accumulating piles of trash. An unexpectedly interesting book.
Lilian Rubin. Families on the Faultline: America's Working Class Speaks Out about the Family, the Economy, Race, and Ethnicity. Rubin makes clear that the American refusal to even admit that there ARE class barriers is especially hurtful to members of the working class, people increasingly marginalized in our economy. Here they talk about their economic insecurity, the way that what they do has been devalued, and the ways in which popular culture undermines their values, and government fails to support them. Many of these people are white and unabashedly racist, seeing "special privileges" being handed out to blacks that are denied to them, though they personally never discriminated against anyone. The interviews are done with tact and insight, and they are very revealing.
Maggie Scarf. Intimate Worlds. An impressive study of families, ranging from the totally dysfunctional through adequate. Detailed accounts of the internal workings and shared mythologies of families are presented along with a more general analytical model of typical behaviors in families at different parts of the spectrum. Fascinating.
Dr. Laura Schlesinger. How Could You Do That? Popular radio psychologist Dr. Laura takes people to task for making stupid and thoughtless decisions and then being surprised at the consequences and expecting to be held blameless for them. Much of what is in the book is drawn directly from her callers' stories, but she shapes it into a thematic whole about moral responsibility. She's a scold, but an interesting one.
Randy Shilts. Conduct Unbecoming. The definitive work anyone should read before discussing the issue of whether gays should be allowed to serve in the military. Shilts gives us a history of military service by homosexuals, showing that the military has never NOT had gays--the only issue is whether their sexual preference was concealed. Shilts has collected the stories of thousands of gay servicemen and women, and their stories make it clear that the unvbecoming conduct is that of the officers who pursue and hound honorable men and women, who perform their job well, out of the service, solely on the grounds of suspicion of homosexuality (often proof is not required). He also shows how easy it is for people who dislike another service member, or have their advances rejected by another service member, to exact revenge by accusing the person of homosexuality. Shilts raises major issues of civil rights, military justice, and unreasoning prejudice, and also asks whether we as a nation need to be concerned at all about the personal consensual sexual conduct of people who are performing their jobs well. Regardless of your moral stance on this issue, this book presents basic information you must have to discuss the subject intelligently.
Martha Stout. The Sociopath Next Door. There are lots more of them than we realized - 1 in 25 Americans living without any conscience. Not all of them are killers, but all of them are capable of messing up lying, cheating and messing up people's lives without the faintest compunction, and Stout explains who they are and how they work their devastation.
Melvin Urofsky. A Conflict of Rights The story behind the Supreme Court's first affirmative action decision, involving Diane Joyce and Paul Johnson. Both of them seemed equally qualified for a promotion, though their qualifications were different. She had necessary experience that he lacked, but he scored 3 points higher on the test and believed that was proof he was more qualified. Since no woman had ever been promoted to that level before, she was given the edge, and he sued. Though he lost, he remained forever convinced that the system gave unfair preference to a less qualified person. Anyone who wants to understand all the ramifications and emotional impact of affirmative action should read this book.
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