Nonfiction
Steve Delsohn, The Fire Inside: Firefighters Talk About Their Lives: Pretty much what it says on the tin: training stories, war stories, discussions of the EMT aspects of the job as well as the firefighting. Engaging and gives you a better sense of the good and bad reasons people run into burning buildings.
Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States: Why does the US look so strange compared to other places with big cities, with failing urban cores surrounded by prosperous (ticklike, even) suburbs? Jackson gives the history of US suburbanization, which started with cheap transportation via streetcars and railroads and exploded with the rise of the automobile. He argues that there were two key preconditions-the suburban ideal of living in detached housing with an automobile (desires he argues are shared widely beyond the US, but the US’s wealth enabled more people to fulfill that ideal) and population growth, making geographic expansion seem desirable. And then there were two fundamental causes: racial prejudice (which led whites to flee cities when they could, and led to government policies that made it easier for whites to flee and harder for minorities, most especially African-Americans, to go anywhere-the government turned prejudice into policy, so that homes in “redlined” areas couldn’t get mortgages and therefore couldn’t help African-Americans build wealth) and cheap housing (also the result of government decisions to subsidize suburbanization, homeownership, and automobile transit, as well as new construction technology, abundant land, and relative wealth). Wealthy developers were allowed to shape government policy, unlike in Europe, so, for example, municipal services were extended to suburbs, often paid for by the cities they were draining.
Very interesting and depressing reading; published in 1984, Jackson makes some predictions about the future of suburbanization that, a quarter-century later, have mostly not been borne out, though they haven’t been disproved either.
John Hockenberry, Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence: Hockenberry begins the book with the story of going out among refugee Kurds during the first Iraq war, unable to take his wheelchair because of the terrain. So he’s riding a donkey, except for when he falls off and is nearly left to die in the mud, and the people around him variously save his life; answer his questions; and wonder what an American is doing there, why America isn’t helping them, and why another man who can’t walk has joined them when they have troubles enough of their own. From the start, the book is about privilege, specifically Hockenberry’s privilege as a white American man and his lack of privilege as a paraplegic, and how those intersect.
While Hockenberry mostly refuses to analogize, he does say that the people who’ve treated him as a person rather than as a problem have usually been outside America or, in the US, African-American; at one point, he suggests that the default American (white male) position is to assume that things are going to work-work for him, work in his favor, just operate--and that in the countries where he’s been a foreign correspondent, that’s often not an assumption people can afford, just as it’s not for him even when he’s in the US. Hockenberry’s a jerk-one story about him hiding under an ex-girlfriend’s bed makes that supremely clear-but he’s also a good reporter, and I found the book really engaging reading. There’s a great bit, for example, about the relationship between disability, insurance, and cars, and the American insistence on getting people into cars no matter the cost. The stories are roughly half about America and half about other countries: Israel, Iraq, Somalia, Iran. Highly recommended.
Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide: Argues that violence directed at Indians has been specifically sexual-Indians, especially women, seen as inherently dirty and therefore proper subjects of rape and extermination-and that putting the most disadvantaged groups at the center of any analysis and policy reforms is the key to avoiding using one axis of oppression to increase another, as she argues occurs when reformers try to use the criminal justice system to punish batterers and rapists in Indian communities. She also connects New Agey white interest in Indian ceremonies (not usually religions, but the trappings thereof) with sexual violence: it’s all about knowledge, and knowing the unwilling, and knowledge is of course a word for sex as well as information.
She admits that many proposals for dealing with offenders in the community are hampered by the fact that many in the community don’t see sexual violence as a big problem, and I was left uncertain what concrete steps she wanted to see, but that’s a standard problem with a big critique and the connections she makes are important ones. Reproductive “choice,” for example, looks very different if you’re from a group historically at risk of forced sterilization, losing your children to the state, and tremendous material difficulty if you do have children. Reproductive justice is a very different thing than choice, and she argues that Indian women should make strategic alliances on both sides of the abortion/contraception debate, and also demand to get something out of those alliances rather than accepting that their interests are somehow subsumed in those of the larger (white) group.
Julie Holland, Weekends at Bellevue: Nine Years on the Night Shift at the Psych ER: Free LibraryThing review copy. A doctor’s-eye view of the people who end up at Bellevue, doctors as well as patients (because of her structural position, her relations with the nurses and security guards are basically on her terms and she doesn’t go into great detail about them). The book is a little padded with musings on her life, especially once she starts spending a lot of time on “motherhood”-it’s important to know how that affects her time at Bellevue, but probably not so important to hear about what she's doing at home. But the book does give a good sense of how doctors experience a psych ER-the power, the fear (she gets punched, she gets stalked), the desire to help and the concomitant desire to slot everyone into the proper category and be done with them. She lets her own mental state affect the care she gives others, as you’d expect basically everyone but saints to do, and tries to explain that with personal history and the vulnerability of caretaker types to burnout. She talked a bit about deinstitutionalization and how her patients were in Bellevue-often on their way to jail-because of the fallout from the failure to make other provisions for people who needed help and could no longer be locked up forever, but she didn’t seem to question whether Bellevue itself could have been set up in ways that didn’t encourage staff burnout and the resulting effects on patients.
James Conaway, America’s Library: The Story of the Library of Congress 1800-2000: Lots of books, never enough money and staff, but at least things have stopped catching on fire.
Sandra J. Ackerman, Hard Science, Hard Choices: Facts, Ethics and Policies Guiding Brain Science Today: Summaries of sessions and discussions from a conference on the matter, raising issues like the ethics of neuroenhancement, the possible use of neuroimaging as lie detection, the relationship between brain structure and criminal responsibility, and so on. Not deep, but might be a useful intro to pending controversies.
comments on DW
Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States: Why does the US look so strange compared to other places with big cities, with failing urban cores surrounded by prosperous (ticklike, even) suburbs? Jackson gives the history of US suburbanization, which started with cheap transportation via streetcars and railroads and exploded with the rise of the automobile. He argues that there were two key preconditions-the suburban ideal of living in detached housing with an automobile (desires he argues are shared widely beyond the US, but the US’s wealth enabled more people to fulfill that ideal) and population growth, making geographic expansion seem desirable. And then there were two fundamental causes: racial prejudice (which led whites to flee cities when they could, and led to government policies that made it easier for whites to flee and harder for minorities, most especially African-Americans, to go anywhere-the government turned prejudice into policy, so that homes in “redlined” areas couldn’t get mortgages and therefore couldn’t help African-Americans build wealth) and cheap housing (also the result of government decisions to subsidize suburbanization, homeownership, and automobile transit, as well as new construction technology, abundant land, and relative wealth). Wealthy developers were allowed to shape government policy, unlike in Europe, so, for example, municipal services were extended to suburbs, often paid for by the cities they were draining.
Very interesting and depressing reading; published in 1984, Jackson makes some predictions about the future of suburbanization that, a quarter-century later, have mostly not been borne out, though they haven’t been disproved either.
John Hockenberry, Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence: Hockenberry begins the book with the story of going out among refugee Kurds during the first Iraq war, unable to take his wheelchair because of the terrain. So he’s riding a donkey, except for when he falls off and is nearly left to die in the mud, and the people around him variously save his life; answer his questions; and wonder what an American is doing there, why America isn’t helping them, and why another man who can’t walk has joined them when they have troubles enough of their own. From the start, the book is about privilege, specifically Hockenberry’s privilege as a white American man and his lack of privilege as a paraplegic, and how those intersect.
While Hockenberry mostly refuses to analogize, he does say that the people who’ve treated him as a person rather than as a problem have usually been outside America or, in the US, African-American; at one point, he suggests that the default American (white male) position is to assume that things are going to work-work for him, work in his favor, just operate--and that in the countries where he’s been a foreign correspondent, that’s often not an assumption people can afford, just as it’s not for him even when he’s in the US. Hockenberry’s a jerk-one story about him hiding under an ex-girlfriend’s bed makes that supremely clear-but he’s also a good reporter, and I found the book really engaging reading. There’s a great bit, for example, about the relationship between disability, insurance, and cars, and the American insistence on getting people into cars no matter the cost. The stories are roughly half about America and half about other countries: Israel, Iraq, Somalia, Iran. Highly recommended.
Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide: Argues that violence directed at Indians has been specifically sexual-Indians, especially women, seen as inherently dirty and therefore proper subjects of rape and extermination-and that putting the most disadvantaged groups at the center of any analysis and policy reforms is the key to avoiding using one axis of oppression to increase another, as she argues occurs when reformers try to use the criminal justice system to punish batterers and rapists in Indian communities. She also connects New Agey white interest in Indian ceremonies (not usually religions, but the trappings thereof) with sexual violence: it’s all about knowledge, and knowing the unwilling, and knowledge is of course a word for sex as well as information.
She admits that many proposals for dealing with offenders in the community are hampered by the fact that many in the community don’t see sexual violence as a big problem, and I was left uncertain what concrete steps she wanted to see, but that’s a standard problem with a big critique and the connections she makes are important ones. Reproductive “choice,” for example, looks very different if you’re from a group historically at risk of forced sterilization, losing your children to the state, and tremendous material difficulty if you do have children. Reproductive justice is a very different thing than choice, and she argues that Indian women should make strategic alliances on both sides of the abortion/contraception debate, and also demand to get something out of those alliances rather than accepting that their interests are somehow subsumed in those of the larger (white) group.
Julie Holland, Weekends at Bellevue: Nine Years on the Night Shift at the Psych ER: Free LibraryThing review copy. A doctor’s-eye view of the people who end up at Bellevue, doctors as well as patients (because of her structural position, her relations with the nurses and security guards are basically on her terms and she doesn’t go into great detail about them). The book is a little padded with musings on her life, especially once she starts spending a lot of time on “motherhood”-it’s important to know how that affects her time at Bellevue, but probably not so important to hear about what she's doing at home. But the book does give a good sense of how doctors experience a psych ER-the power, the fear (she gets punched, she gets stalked), the desire to help and the concomitant desire to slot everyone into the proper category and be done with them. She lets her own mental state affect the care she gives others, as you’d expect basically everyone but saints to do, and tries to explain that with personal history and the vulnerability of caretaker types to burnout. She talked a bit about deinstitutionalization and how her patients were in Bellevue-often on their way to jail-because of the fallout from the failure to make other provisions for people who needed help and could no longer be locked up forever, but she didn’t seem to question whether Bellevue itself could have been set up in ways that didn’t encourage staff burnout and the resulting effects on patients.
James Conaway, America’s Library: The Story of the Library of Congress 1800-2000: Lots of books, never enough money and staff, but at least things have stopped catching on fire.
Sandra J. Ackerman, Hard Science, Hard Choices: Facts, Ethics and Policies Guiding Brain Science Today: Summaries of sessions and discussions from a conference on the matter, raising issues like the ethics of neuroenhancement, the possible use of neuroimaging as lie detection, the relationship between brain structure and criminal responsibility, and so on. Not deep, but might be a useful intro to pending controversies.
comments on DW