High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing (Austen)

All this time, I thought it was ‘High-Rises.’ The reality is much better.

This is an excellent account of the history of Cabrini-Green. Austen moves effectively between the macro and the micro, and he’s aware that he’s not writing for policy wonks. Though he makes it clear how it easy it can be to get stymied by the bureaucracy, he’s equally aware that the average reader probably doesn’t want to get lost in all of the muck.

I also admired how he kept the camera close on Cabrini-Green and Chicago while also making it clear that C-G stands also as a symbol and a symptom of much larger issues.

Austen paces the narrative well and is adept at creating characters on all sides of the issue that allow him to humanize a policy issue.

Having lived in Chicago during some of this time, I was amazed at how much I didn’t know – how much being in the bubble of the South Side (Hyde Park) – made me oblivious.

I do remember getting frustrated when I was waiting for a bus after an interview and deciding to walk to where I could pick up the #6 Jeffrey Express back to Hyde Park. I was muttering to myself in frustration when I looked up and saw the towers and thought, “Huh, so that’s where they are.” I likely quickened my pace. That’s as close as I ever got to the history Austen recounts. In other words, even though I was in that bubble, I ‘knew’ enough to be concerned for my safety. I wonder where that came from.

All in all, a very good book.

Grey Bees (Kurkov)

Current events have made me realize how little I know about Ukraine. I try to keep up in the newspapers and I appreciate the efforts that local bookstores have made to highlight non-fiction options, I don’t have enough confidence in my knowledge of non-fiction to make a choice yet. (Any recommendations?)

So when I saw a review for this one, I thought I’d give the fiction angle a try. This book is certainly intriguing, if a bit slow at times. It starts in the Grey Zone, a no-man’s-land area between loyalist and separatist forces. There are only two people who have remained, Sergey, the protagonist, and Pashka, his “frenemy.” (I have a hard time believing that that’s the exact translation, but I’m sure the otherwise excellent translator, Boris Dralyuk, couldn’t come up with anything else; some words just don’t translate.) Sergey, retired because of health reasons and younger than I initially envisioned him, has become a bee-keeper. The two metaphors of the book’s title can be heavy handed at times, but it’s the details of ordinary existence in this grey zone and when Sergey leaves it for a time that make this book quietly compelling and definitely illuminating. There are moments and scenes that will resonate with me for a good long time, and Kurkov includes the right balance of personal elements to make it well-balanced between the personal and political. I thought the way he handled Sergey’s dealings with his ex-wife was excellent.

This Is Our Summons Now: Poems (Rodriguez)

I love this title. The juxtaposition with the slightly antiquated ‘summons’ with its legal connotations with the urgency of ‘now.’ Perhaps it’s because I know Rodriguez a little bit from having taken a class with him, neither aspect of that phrase surprises me. He and his poems are polite, respectful, and quiet. But do not let that element fool you; he understands the “tremendous urgency of now.” In my case, I saw it in the way that he regarded the needs of those trying to navigate the borderlands, a motif that recurs here, notably in a poem like “Homeland Insecurity.” His concerns are not always explicitly political, but narrative, as he says in “Trinidad”: I got easily distracted by the unsaid / and wanted to write the other story instead. And he does.

Rodriguez is a thoughtful observer, both of actions and words, the latter both in Spanish and English. His facility with a wide range of forms is impressive, and I very much look forward to his future work.

Overcoming the Achievement Gap Trap: Liberating Mindsets to Effect Change (Muhammad)

I fought with this book, which is a good thing. I made lots of notes in the margins, many in the form of questions or challenges to the author. Chapter 4 (The Superiority Mindset), Chapter 5 (The Victim Mindset), and Chapter 6 (The Liberation Mindset) prompted most of my responses, particularly the first two. But I appreciate Muhammad’s approach. What do we, as teachers, need to do shift our thinking in order to break the cycle that strengthens and expands the achievement gap. (I was surprised to see Muhammad call it that, though perhaps the publication date (2015) pre-dates the change to the phrase ‘opportunity gap.’ And yes, I think that change matters and Muhammad’s book makes some of the arguments as to why it does.)

As much as I felt challenged by The Superiority Mindset chapter, I welcomed, though not without qualification, The Victim Mindset chapter, and I certainly agree that Muhammad’s concept of The Liberation Mindset should be goal/ideal.

This was a good book to read as I prepare to move to a new school and take up the task of working with 9th graders. I think the chapters I mentioned would make for good discussion material among teachers.

Bloodbrothers (Price)

Man, I’d read a grocery list if Richard Price wrote it. I am not sure there is anyone who creates character (especially by means of dialogue) better than Price, and this was one of his earliest books. Yes, there are things one might find offensive – language, sexuality, etc. – but to see the work of someone of his caliber when he was still developing his skills is well worth it. I’m not asking you to like the guy, or even the book. But I think you have to admire the writing. This Picador edition is worth it for the author interview alone.

Angela Davis: An Autobiography (Davis)

It was interesting to read the three different prefaces Davis has written for the three different editions of her autobiography. It’s probably not surprising that the most recent one has her at her analytical and incisive best. I wonder if she’ll ever expand her autobiography or if there was even a temptation to revise what she’d written.

The autobiography itself is definitely worth reading, more for accounts of specific moments in her political development than for the sections of sweeping summary. In the latter, the prose kind of flattens out. But her explanations of her own intellectual development, her stories about her travels, specific protests, and, of course, her own trial, are all quite compelling.

And Toni Morrison edited it. Can you imagine the two of them talking?

https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1741-angela-davis

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (Stoppard)

You can tell, by now, that Hermione Lee’s biography of Stoppard had a profound impact on me. I had seen this movie many years ago and remember laughing hysterically at the tennis scene. This one reads pretty well, and I understand it more than I did then. Perhaps that’s because I know Hamlet and Godot better than I did then. Though it’s clearly not a high budget film, Stoppard’s words are in good hands with the very young Gary Oldman and Tim Roth as well, to a lesser extent, Richard Dreyfus, who seems, at times, to be simply trying too hard. And, of course, it helped that Stoppard directed the film, a fact I did not remember. Enough about the movie.

This one was okay to read. It’s funny and profound, but as a piece of literature, I can’t really recommend it. If you have a chance to see it on stage, go to it. If not, try the movie. I’m just not sure you can get a good appreciation of it from reading it on its own. (Lee’s biography did indicate that Stoppard’s scripts sold remarkably well, which I find both surprising and impressive.)

On Juneteenth (Gordon-Reed)

I don’t know what I thought this was going to be – perhaps a history explaining Juneteenth or an argument about why it should be a federal holiday? I don’t think the back of the book gets it right either when it classifies the book only as “History” and says the book is “the essential, sweeping story of Juneteenth’s integral importance.”

It’s a wonderful hybrid of a book. If you don’t what Juneteenth celebrates, you will find it here, so it is part-history. It is also part-memoir, as Gordon-Reed explores the legacy of Juneteenth on her own life (she was moved to a previously all white school at an early age), so the book is also part-memoir. In the end, I think it’s best understood as a kind of love letter to her home state, a state that Gordon-Reed says is so stereotyped as to be frequently misunderstood. The book examines why it’s so significant that the proclamation celebrated on Juneteenth took place in Texas.

However you want to approach it, I think it’s definitely worthwhile reading, both for increasing your understanding of Juneteenth and for (re)considering Texas as a kind of stand in for all of the United States.

Disappearing Ink: The Insider, The FBI, and the Looting of the Kenyon College Library (McDade)

This is an efficient little account of a robbery that seems to have happened pretty much in plain sight – and robbery is likely not a strong enough word. But the story does reveal what can happen when we don’t have secure systems in place and no one really pays attention to the systems that do exist. Nobody asked questions here, at least not soon enough. Not even his own family members.

And I appreciate that McDade, like me, believes what happened here matters. It was not just the loss of books, but the loss of correspondence and various other records. Inasmuch as Kenyon prioritized getting materials back, they could not succeed completely, in part because they had no record of what had been taken. I hope this story resonated with libraries around the world so that they took steps to prevent them from being the next victim.

McDade’s writing is brisk and largely journalistic. He used a variety of sources to put this compelling narrative together. Now imagine if those sources had been lost?

Leopoldstadt (Stoppard)

If this turns out to be Stoppard’s last play, then he will have gone out on a high note. And it should also end any claims that Stoppard is not an emotional or political playwright, criticism he faced constantly according to his biographer, and criticism that is, I think, based on a very superficial understanding of his work. Unlike The Coast of Utopia, this one was eminently readable and the ending was quite emotional for me. I hope to get to see it on stage.

It’s coming to Broadway in September – https://leopoldstadtplay.com/