October 07, 2008
WINTER BOOK SUGGESTION
MARTIN & MALCOLM & AMERICA: A DREAM OR A NIGHTMARE by James H. Cone
This is one of the best books I've encountered.
Cone discusses the rhetorical strategies of Martin Luther King, Jr, and Malcolm X as they applied to their particular audiences: King to the South and Malcolm X to the North. Cone argues that Martin King's strategy of non-violent protest, while effective in the extremely segregated and anti-integrationist South, was not effective in the North (particularly in cities like Chicago and Detroit) because the discourse and policy of "integration" was already superficially accepted by Northeners. The "liberal" North found King's rhetoric to be more or less agreeable even as the structures of discrimination continued to subject black people to a brutal double-standard. Thus Malcolm X's policy of Black Nationalism (separatist rather than integrationist) that allowed for violence epitomized by the slogan "by any means necessary" was more successful in the North because it more effectively confronted personal and systematic racism. Long story short: two different rhetors with different rhetorics because of different situations, different audiences, with different immediate goals. Interestingly, near the close of both men's lives--Malcolm X killed in 1965 and Martin King in 1968--Malcolm began to sound a little more like Martin; and Martin began to speak even more forcefully, not unlike Malcolm had been known to do previously.
Posted by mkp at 01:07 PM | Comments (0)
SPRING BOOK SUGGESTION
A GLASS CASTLE: A Memoir, by Jeannette Walls
Kirkus Reviews
TRUE STORY...An account of growing up nomadic, starry-eyed, and dirt poor in the '60s and '70s, by journalist Walls (Dish, 2000). From her first memory, of catching fire while boiling hotdogs by herself in the trailer park her family was passing through, to her last glimpse of her mother, picking through a New York City Dumpster, Walls's detached, direct, and unflinching account of her rags-to-riches life proves a troubling ride. Her parents, Rex Walls, from the poor mining town of Welch, West Virginia, and Rose Mary, a well-educated artist from Phoenix, love a good adventure and usually don't take into account the care of the children who keep arriving-Lori, Jeannette, Brian, and Maureen-leaving them largely to fend for themselves. For entrepreneur and drinker Rex, "Doing the skedaddle" means getting out of town fast, pursued by creditors. Rex is a dreamer, and someday his gold-digging tool (the Prospector), or, better, his ingenious ideas for energy-efficiency, will fund the building of his desert dream house, the Glass Castle. But moving from Las Vegas to San Francisco to Nevada and back to rock-bottom Welch provides a precarious existence for the kids-on-and-off schooling, living with exposed wiring and no heat or plumbing, having little or nothing to eat. Protesting their paranoia toward authority and their insistence on "true values" for their children ("What doesn't kill you will make you stronger," chirps Mom), these parents have some dubious nurturing practices, such as teaching the children to con and shoplift. The deprivations do sharpen the wits of the children-leading to the family's collective escape to New York City, where they all make good, even the parents, who are content tolive homeless. The author's tell-it-like-it-was memoir is moving because it's unsentimental; she neither demonizes nor idealizes her parents, and there remains an admirable libertarian quality about them, though it justifiably elicits the children's exasperation and disgust. Walls's journalistic bare-bones style makes for a chilling, wrenching, incredible testimony of childhood neglect. A pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps, thoroughly American story.
Posted by mkp at 12:58 PM | Comments (0)
August 27, 2008
Book Suggestion -- Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
By Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
Book Review (From Amazon)
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, who has written for the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The Village Voice, and others, gained unprecedented access to those living in an impoverished section of the Bronx. For some ten years the author shared their existence as she documented struggles, defeats, and transient victories. "Random Family" is an astonishing work of straightforward reportage; it is also written with heart.
A stunning picture of life in the Bronx drug trade, "Random Family" is traced through the experiences of two girls, Jessica and Coco. In Part I, "The Street" we are introduced to Jessica who lived on Tremont Avenue, "...one of the poorer blocks in a very poor section of the Bronx. She dressed even to go to the store. Chance was opportunity in the ghetto and you had to be prepared for anything....A sixteen-year-old Puerto Rican girl with bright hazel eyes, a generous mouth, and a voluptuous shape, she radiated intimacy wherever she went. You could be talking to her in the bustle of Tremont and feel as though lovers' confidences were being exchanged beneath a tent of sheets. Guys in cars offered rides. Women pursed their lips, grown men got stupid, boys made promises they could not keep."
Jessica's man of choice is Boy George, a young heroin dealer with money to spare and a willingness to do anything to earn more. He provides undreamed of escapes: trips, jewelry buying sprees, and a car that James Bond would envy. He's also free with physical abuse.
Coco, a fourteen-year-old, is the other girl. "Boys called her Shorty because she was short, and Lollipop because she tucked lollipops in the topknot of her ponytail; her teacher called her Motor Mouth because she talked a lot."
But, school wasn't high on Coco's list of priorities. She has eyes for Cesar, Jessica's younger brother, who is working hard at becoming a thug. This pair also enjoys the big time for a while, if you can relish luxury while your friends are being murdered.
Teenage pregnancies are the norm, and being old at 30 isn't a surprise. Prison becomes home.
"Random Family" is a look at a part of our country we would like to think does not exist. But, it does and the awareness of it sears. We owe a debt of gratitude to Adrian Nicole LeBlanc for her honesty and dogged courage.
Posted by vardigan at 11:21 AM | Comments (0)
Book Suggestion -- Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
By Azar Nafisi
Book Summary(From Random House site)
We all have dreams—things we fantasize about doing and generally never get around to. This is the story of Azar Nafisi’s dream and of the nightmare that made it come true.
For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. They were all former students whom she had taught at university. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; several had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they began to open up and to speak more freely, not only about the novels they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments. Their stories intertwined with those they were reading—Pride and Prejudice, Washington Square, Daisy Miller and Lolita—their Lolita, as they imagined her in Tehran.
Nafisi’s account flashes back to the early days of the revolution, when she first started teaching at the University of Tehran amid the swirl of protests and demonstrations. In those frenetic days, the students took control of the university, expelled faculty members and purged the curriculum. When a radical Islamist in Nafisi’s class questioned her decision to teach The Great Gatsby, which he saw as an immoral work that preached falsehoods of “the Great Satan,� she decided to let him put Gatsby on trial and stood as the sole witness for the defense.
Azar Nafisi’s luminous tale offers a fascinating portrait of the Iran-Iraq war viewed from Tehran and gives us a rare glimpse, from the inside, of women’s lives in revolutionary Iran. It is a work of great passion and poetic beauty, written with a startlingly original voice.
Posted by vardigan at 10:38 AM | Comments (0)
August 12, 2008
Book Suggestion:BLINK
BLINK: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
by Malcolm Gladwell
From the Jacket:
Malcolm Gladwell redefined how we understand the world around us. Now, in Blink, he revolutionizes the way we understand the world within. Blink is a book about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant - in the blink of an eye - that actually aren't as simple as they seem. Why are some people brilliant decision makers, while others are consistently inept? Why do some people follow their instincts and win, while others end up stumbling into error? How do our brains really work - in the office, in the classroom, in the kitchen, and in the bedroom? And why are the best decisions often those that are impossible to explain to others?
In Blink we meet the psychologist who has learned to predict whether a marriage will last, based on a few minutes of observing a couple; the tennis coach who knows when a player will double-fault before the racket even makes contact with the ball; the antiquities experts who recognize a fake at a glance. Here, too, are great failures of "blink": the election of Warren Harding; "New Coke"; and the shooting of Amadou Diallo by police. Blink reveals that great decision makers aren't those who process the most information or spend the most time deliberating, but those who have perfected the art of "thin-slicing" - filtering the very few factors that matter from an overwhelming number of variables.
Drawing on cutting-edge neuroscience and psychology and displaying all of the brilliance that made The Tipping Point a classic, Blink changes the way you understand every decision you make. Never again will you think about thinking the same way.
BLINK: Media Reviews
Booklist - Donna Seaman
Gladwell writes about subtle yet crucial behavioral phenomena with lucidity and contagious enthusiasm. Unconscious knowledge is not the proverbial light bulb, he observes, but rather a flickering candle. Gladwell's groundbreaking explication of a key aspect of human nature is enlightening, provocative, and great fun to read.
Library Journal - Mary Ann Hughes
Journalist Gladwell (The Tipping Point) examines the process of snap decision making. [He] gets the science facts right and has the journalistic skills to make them utterly engrossing...for once a best seller will be more than worthy. Essential for all libraries.
Kirkus Reviews
All these stories are nicely written and most inform and entertain at the same time, but they don't add up to anything terribly profound, despite the author's sometimes Skywalkerish enthusiasm. Brisk, impressively done narratives that should sell very well indeed, particularly to Gladwell's already well-established fan base.
The Seattle Times - William Dietrich
Blink is not a glib handbook of how to think, or a guide of what to think. But it will make you think about how you think, when you think in a blink.
BLINK: Reading Book Guide-THE THEORY OF THIN SLICES
1.Have you ever had a feeling that a couple's future is successful or doomed just by witnessing a brief exchange between them? What do you think you're picking up on?
2.Many couples seek marriage counseling from a therapist, a priest, rabbi etc. But do you think a couple about to get married should go and see John Gottman, the psychologist who can predict with a 95% accuracy whether a couple will be together in 15 years just by watching an hour of their interaction? If you were about to be married or could go back to before you were, would you want to see Gottman and find out his prediction?
3.The central argument of Blink is that our unconscious is able to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience. This is called 'thin-slicing.' What kinds of phenomena, if any, do not lend themselves to 'thin-slicing?'
4.Gottman decodes a couple's relationship and predicts divorce by identifying their patterns of behavior. Can we change our natural and unconscious patterns of behavior? Would awareness of these patterns with our partner be enough to avert an inevitable break-up?
5.Do you think you could hire someone by 'thin-slicing' the candidate during a brief interview? Or do you think this would only work for certain kinds of jobs or perhaps, only certain kinds of people?
6.The psychologist, Samuel Gosling, shows how 'thin-slicing' can be used to judge people's personality when he uses the dorm room observers. Visualize your bedroom right now. What does it say about you?
7.If scrolling through someone's iPod or scanning their bookshelf can tell us more about that individual, what other kinds of 'thin-slicing' exercises could reveal aspects of their personality?
Posted by mkp at 01:50 PM | Comments (0)