Turn The Ship Around!

There are high schools all over America that use the “workshop model” for lessons; the teacher spends five minutes on a lecture, then the students are left to work alone or in groups. Basically, it boils down to “I do and you watch, then you do and I watch.” Some say it’s great, because it teaches the kids to be self-sufficient. But the more advanced students might be happy to do a “chalk and talk” where the teacher lectures and the kids copy off the blackboard. Regardless, by the end of the year the students should be able to handle book reports, school projects, and presentations without a lot of help. If not, then it’s been a waste of time.

People that find themselves in a position of authority are often fixated on obedience and protocol, not on results. The author David Marquet was in that kind of situation. He knew from the get go that as a nuclear submarine captain, he could not be in every place at once, and micromanagement would take its toll. So he simply delegated stuff to his subordinates and that was that. Only it didn’t work. He found defects in the ship’s engineering, repairs weren’t being done, and the crew were silent on what they needed. He had six months to get the ship ready, and if he screwed up, his promotions were finished.

One of the main points of this book is that you have to make the employees responsible for their own work. The early problem in Marquet’s command style was that he’d give an order, wait for it to be carried out, and the seaman would mess up. The reason was simple; the guy had no idea how to do it right, or the orders were too confusing. When he asked why nobody said anything, they’d say “you told us to do it.” These men and women were taught never to question orders, nor say they didn’t know what to do. If the captain wanted something that couldn’t be delivered, the crew were at a loss. They would never say “captain, this ship can’t do that!” If they screwed up, it would be the CO’s problem. If the ship was found to be a mess AFTER the captain left, he was free and clear. It would be the new CO’s problem.

Management is a tricky thing. On one hand you have to give orders to your subordinates, but at the same time you don’t want to insult them or piss them off. You have to make sure they’re doing their jobs, while at the same time you can’t hover over them. Not only does it annoy the employee, but you don’t have time for it either. It also gets in the way of them doing their jobs. Marquet’s radical change was that the sailors had to let him know if the orders couldn’t be done, or if they lacked supplies to make repairs.

After reading this book, along with Michael Abrashoff’s It’s Your Ship, I wonder if perhaps these lessons apply to educators as well.

The Recovery Bible

Alcoholism is a problem that ruins people of all social classes. In The Recovery Bible we have first person accounts of addiction and recovery, but they’re mostly from the days before World War II. This was an era when you didn’t have fancy rehab, and recovery meant cold turkey, not pills. You didn’t have Hollywood celebrities getting famous from their addictions, because the shame of alcohol and sleeping pills were an incentive to keep it all hidden. One of the radical things about Alcoholics Anonymous is that it required confession; you had to admit that your drinking had taken control of you, and that you were no longer in charge. But there’s one thing absent from a lot of these accounts; nobody changes their habits unless they really want to, and to really want to, you may have to hit rock bottom.

It’s an interesting book. Most of the accounts are by men, and that doesn’t surprise me, because up until the 1920’s, it was considered unacceptable for women to drink alcohol. Those of you that watch Sex And The City know that it perfectly common these days for both genders to have $30 cocktails every day of the week, and that was something you didn’t see at the time AA began. Come to think of it, the Sex And The City characters probably drink two or three pints of hard liquor in every episode. But in the Back Slider chapter of The Recovery Bible, it’s clear that the man’s alcoholism made things a hundred times worse for the women in the family. You didn’t have a whole lot of jobs for women in those days, and if the husband and father started drinking, the family would be ruined.

I have only one problem with this book, in that I believe it may give a slightly inaccurate representation of the events that lead to a person joining Alcoholics Anonymous. It’s unlikely that an addict will want help unless he loses his support network, or to put it in a gambler’s lingo, “his luck runs out.” The only way he’ll acknowledge that his luck has run out is when his wife locks him out, his family hang up on his, and his boss fires him. Out on the streets with nothing, he’ll soon realize that his ways don’t work. It’s for this reason that I think The Lost Weekend had the wrong ending. The alcoholic in that story would not have stopped drinking as long as his girlfriend was there, and his brother was paying his rent, and the bar gave him credit. I’ve heard addiction counselors tell me the same thing.

Stuck in Place by Patrick Sharkey

A recent book titled Waking From The Dream explains what happened after Dr. King died; the movement fractured, no strong leader came to replace him, feelings of anger became pervasive, and the new issues, like poverty, drug addiction, teen pregnancy, traumatized Black Vietnam Veterans, and healthcare were not addressed. Now comes this book by Patrick Sharkey about just that; social problems being ignored. But he concentrates on what the media calls “The Ghetto,” and by that we mean the crumbling, depressed, polluted, and neglected inner city neighborhoods, with a majority Black population and few advantages.

A running theme of Stuck in Place is the issue of inheritance. He stresses that Black children inherit the hopelessness of their lives from their parents, and you end up with several generations of poverty and poor health. I was about to criticize the author for using the term Ghetto, but then he clarifies his reasons for using it. He calls it a “special expression of social process” and in a way, it is. After decades of living in disgusting conditions, people forget that there are better places to go, and there are ways to get out. The word Ghetto comes from the Italian borghetto, meaning “borough.” They were quarters of a city designated for the Jewish residents, and that was the only part of the city where Jews could live. They were usually situated in the lowest part of the city, an area that often flooded. Unlike the Ghettos of Venice, Rome, and Prague, there’s no wall around the American ghetto. There are no gates that are locked at night to keep in the residents (or protect them from angry mobs every time a Christian child is found murdered.) You can walk in and out at any time, but why would you? Nobody wants to move into a neighborhood where they’ll be unwelcome.

Atlanta is used as an example of failure and disparity, just like it was used in the earlier The Metropolitan Revolution. Inner city areas are neglected in terms of public services and safety, while the suburbs, with private houses and backyards, are safer and better kept. Though Patrick Sharkey doesn’t use it as an example, Atlanta has massive highways lined with low income housing, and there’s zero safety. Traffic lights are miles apart, and there are few sidewalks. Trying to walk from the apartment to the grocery store is lethal. Now if you’re wondering why anybody would want to live there, think of it like this; the developer buys cheap land, builds crappy housing with cheap materials, and the only people who will live there are those who can’t afford anything else. So you end up with a building full of subsidized tenants on a dangerous road with nowhere to buy healthy food. It wouldn’t take much effort for the city to build a sidewalk, bike path, and add traffic lights, but you have a “fractured municipality” that can’t agree on anything.

Sharkey doesn’t talk much about birth control in his book, which I think he should have. Teenage pregnancy is the cause of a lot of our nation’s troubles, and I don’t see enough effort to out an end to it. All the things that can be done to improve blighted neighborhoods, be they trash collection, birth control, tearing down abandoned property, after school programs, require a strong city government to get things done. The most unsuccessful cities, like Detroit, Newark, Compton, and Youngstown, have had a weak city government. If something isn’t done soon, the future looks bleak.

Paging God: Religion In The Halls Of Medicine

Wendy Cadge’s excellent research illustrates the relationship between the religious ministries and the medical industry. Since 2000 the US hospitals have been dealing with patients that are older, sicker, and often depressed, creating a greater need for spiritual counseling and services.  This, in turn, creates a greater need to have hospital chaplains of all faiths, not just Catholic, Protestant, and Jew. You’re also dealing with Muslims, Mormons, Hindus, various Asian religions, and if you’re in Wyoming or Montana, probably some Native American ones.

The author frequently interviews hospital staff in this book, and it turns out that most of the older hospitals have chapels that are just bare rooms with chairs scattered about and a cross on the wall. They were meant as prayer and meditation rooms, and used mainly by visitors or hospital staff. Situated off the lobby, this reinforces the idea that the patients were unlikely to use them. In the chapter From Symbols to Silence, the Muslim staff members ask for a prayer room at Brooklyn Lutheran, because they need to pray five times a day. Again, it’s the staff, not the patients who request it. Unlike other chapels, the Muslims do fine with a bare room. They can’t pray in front of images anyway!

Back in 1999, I remember the South Nassau Community Hospital opening a Jewish chapel to replace and older prayer room. It was a small one, this new chapel, but it was nicely furnished and decorated, with a  stained-glass window (albeit an amateurish one that was made in great haste.) The earlier Jewish chapel, like in other hospitals, was bare and depressing. The administrators (most of them Jewish) wanted something a little more colorful for the patients, as many of them wouldn’t be going home. A major theme in this book is oncology; most of the patients who frequent the prayer rooms have cancer, and that often necessitates longer stays. Even the outpatients who come in for chemotherapy have to put up with daily visits, and you don’t want to depress a cancer patient.

In the last 30 years, the US medical establishment has faced new issues. People live much longer, well past the point where their mental and physical abilities are gone. Older people, accustomed to going to services frequently, can become depressed if the routine changes. The need for proper and well-maintained space for religious service becomes greater, because it can be incredibly depressing if you have to spend your last days in a linoleum tiled room with flickering fluorescent lights and a drop ceiling. The changing demographics are a factor too. In places like Queens and Brooklyn, the growing Muslim population means you have more Muslim staff and patients, and that means you’ll need a Muslim chapel and a Muslim chaplain too. 

Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia Volume 1

This three part book series on Russian criminal tattoos is the result of a Soviet prison guard’s research. Danzig Baldaev didn’t intend to become a prison guard; he was forced to take the job under the Soviet regime. His ancestry is an illustrious one, and his family is an illustration of Russia’s history. His ancestors were Mongols who became Christians, and had a perfectly good relationship with the Russian Czar. They were tough people, always ready to defend their families and property from the escaping criminals who frequently entered their area. But Communism destroyed his family; some fought for the Reds, others for the Whites, and they were both agents and victims of Soviet cruelty. Danzig would grow up in a boarding school for children of “enemies of the state,” most of whom came from educated bilingual families. As an adult he would be assigned (by law not by choice) to be a prison guard. For decades, he drew the prisoners’ tattoos. This book is the result.

The tattoos in this book are entirely political. The all have the same imagery; cats symbolize thievery, and the thieves were the top dog in the jails. Stars refer to the number of years served, and playing cards represent risk. But the designs show a great deal of anger as well. Anti-Soviet images are commonplace, with the faces of Lenin, Marx, and Stalin drawn with horns. Anti-Jewish and anti-Asian motifs figure among the tattoos, because the Asian and Jewish people were probably seen as unwanted foreigners. Nazi swastikas and SS runes are frequent, because they symbolize contempt for the Soviet system. A tattoo of a nude woman means that the wearer hates his last girlfriend, perhaps she betrayed him. American symbolism is common in this book as well. Skulls and cats wear cowboy regalia, the Statue of Liberty is shown covered in barbed wire. It appears that the anti-Soviet criminals looked at the USA a beacon of liberty, and since they hated the Soviets and the Soviets hated the USA, it was the perfect statement.

Soviet Justice was harsh. A teenage boy who got drunk and punched someone could get six years in jail, and on getting out would have no idea how to ask for a job or be on time for work. The depressing life of the Soviet Union probably drove people to alcoholism, and that would’ve led to crime. Food was scarce and people must have been hungry enough to steal from officials. I also have to wonder how many kids were born with fetal alcohol syndrome.

My hat’s off to Danzig Baldaev for keeping this archive. You can learn a lot about a society by studying the prisons, and it makes sense to judge a nation by how they treat the prisoners. As for the book itself, it’s part of a three part series, plus a set of cards that come with it. Perhaps we’ll soon see books on prison tattoos from other nations as well.

Introducing Christian Theologies

Traditional customs can present a tricky dilemma when people convert to Christianity. There’s often debate on whether they can be accepted by the church, or whether they constitute idolatry. Many of the traditions in Christianity, like Yuletide trees and Easter eggs, predate Christianity by centuries.

Introducing Christian Theology explores the symbols in the Old Testament that allow further elaboration. For instance, the Lord first appears in Genesis as the Creator, and the question of Trinity now arises. If the Lord created the universe, can we expect that he would create Jesus as his son? In the Gospel of John, Jesus says “I will ask the father to give you another helper” and describes him as ‘the spirit of truth.” Other theologians wonder if the idea of the Holy Spirit comes from the Jewish idea of the Messiah, which is not clearly defined anywhere in Jewish scripture. Would the Holy Spirit be a divine being, or a prophet? The only thing in Judaism that would match the Holy Spirit is Elijah the Prophet, who was taken to the afterlife while still alive. Therefore, he’s not “dead” and can return at any time!

Victor Ezigbo’s treatise on theology brings a breath of fresh air to the study of religion. He gives new insights to the traditional European view on the bible, and cites both the Five Books and the New Testament, with interesting and enlightening arguments.

Yakama Rising

Michelle Jacob, a professor of sociology at UCSD, argues that the problems in Native American families can be easily fixed when the tribe acts together. I don’t blame you if you respond to this with “well duh!” and I won’t blame you, because we all heard the saying “it takes the village to raise the child.” But this is different; Native Americans were once a communal society, and since the 1880’s the US (and Canada) have tried to force on them the nuclear family ideal, with private property and general privacy. It doesn’t seem to work.

The first chapter explores how traditional dances, above all else, have had a great impact in steering Native American youth from alcohol and crime. It focuses on a woman named Sue Rigdon, a school counselor who grew up in a dysfunctional family, and founded an extracurricular group to teach traditional dancing to kids in Washington State. Others are making efforts to have kids learn the language to that it won’t die out. If that’s not enough, how about the traditional way of preserving fish?

Yakama Rising is something you’ve got to read if you’re looking into grassroots activism. Wherever you go in the USA, you’ll see teens getting into trouble because they’re bored. Afterschool activities have always been a cure-all for social ills, and the social ills always start with the kids.

A Disability of the Soul

Japan has a wonderful record when it comes to education. Their reputation is one of absolutely no wrong, and I believe every word of it. But a classmate from graduate school, who taught English in Japan, had seen what they keep hidden; the special needs students are warehoused in the basement. I also read an article by artist Takashi Murakami, where he says that people with deformities, dermatitis, or obesity are not accepted when in Japan. My research tells me that retarded people are welcomed in the Yakuza gangs, but not much else. So what does a seemingly flawless country like Japan do about the mentally ill? Something tells me it can’t be good.

From the outset I was predisposed to some facts. I know that Japan is smaller than the USA, fewer people to care for, homogenous, non-religious. With their ethic of self-discipline, mental illness must be stigmatizing, and according to the book, I was right. The author says that mentally ill people are warehoused, and their families are loath to talk about it. I’m not surprised, because it was the same thing with upper-class English families until recently. Having a child who was retarded could be disguised as “eccentricity,” but mental illness or epilepsy had to be hidden.

The history of Japan’s care for the mentally ill is bad. In the 1970’s a reporter named Kazuo Okuma went undercover as an alcoholic, and found that the mental facilities were horrific-overcrowded, no time for therapy, Alzheimer’s patients were locked up for days at a time, and they were used for voter fraud. As for psychiatry, the laws were lax, any MD could practice it. The Utsunomiya Hospital scandal revealed a patient beaten to death by orderlies.

But there are improvements, though few. Bethel House is an outpatient commune on the island of Hokaido, and it offers a place where mentally ill adults can work together to help each other cope. Most of them were successful in their jobs until they started hearing voices, feeling paranoid, etc. One middle aged mental patient was in the same hospital for 37 years. He’d rather not leave, because he has no job skills, no friends, nowhere to go, and his family has long since given up on him.

Hokaido is also the home of the Ainu, Japan’s indigenous people. Among the Ainu, mentally ill people were appointed Shaman, or holy people. It was thought that they had a connection to the spirit world. But among the Japanese, mental illness is seen as a flaw in moral character. Whatever problem Japan has in dealing with the mentally ill, it’s all the result of the social norms, not economics.

Managing Disasters Through Public-Private Partnerships

The Federal Reserve, according to this book, was probably the first disaster relief organization in the USA. It certainly did quite a lot after Hurricane Andrew hit Florida in 1992. But at the same time, one can wonder if it was worth it. Even if the Fed provided emergency cash to banks so people could make withdrawals, what use was it if the stores weren’t open?

The War Industries Board was another government agency dealing with business; it negotiated contracts, prices, fees, and labor issues with businesses at a time when the USA couldn’t afford any work stoppages. Similarly, 9/11 was an emergency period, and the government had to provide some aid to businesses or the interdependent US economy would be ruined. But Hurricane Katrina was one disaster where Federal agencies all failed. The disaster lasted months, and Walmart had to make deals with the police and National Guard to provide free stuff in exchange for protection from looters. But it was Walmart that gave people free food and supplies anyway, so it wasn’t the government providing anything.

The US aid to Haiti was no better. Portable toilets were brought along, but no sewage burners, so the US feces flowed into the ground and gave Haiti’s poor the gift of dysentery. The Maersk Alabama, famous for its hijacking, had routine safety drills for piracy emergencies. But the US Coast Guard refused to share advice on how to handle the hijackings. In the book Dead Aid, African economist Dambissa Moyo convinces the reader that traditional assistance doesn’t work. It offers no long-term solution and leaves people dependent. She gives mosquito nets as an example; if the aid organization gives out free mosquito nets, notebooks, and water cans, the local shopkeeper will lose business.

It seems that the point of this book is that government aid works best when the agency deals with large sums of money to large organizations. Overall, things look pretty bleak.

Alaska Natives and American Laws

In the early days of the Alaska territory, nobody cared about it, so there were no issues. There were no settlers looking to grab farmland, so the US Army didn’t have to protect the little houses on the prairie from raids by uncivilized natives (before we learned that those savages were in fact peace-loving ecologists.) The only people going to Alaska were ships looking for animal skins and meat, until the gold rush began. Still, few prospectors had any desire for land, they just wanted to search for non-existent gold deposits and get out. Why would they want to stay, when the land was snow-bound most of the year and there was absolutely nothing to do? But when oil was discovered, the courts were hearing from the natives. They wanted a piece of the profit that the oil drillers were getting. Now the courts had to decide what rights the Alaska peoples had regarding mineral rights. Things got complicated.

The early Federal court cases involved land issues, because it was all about mineral rights, mining licenses, oil drilling licenses, and whether a tribal chief had the right to sell his peoples’ land. In later parts of the book it’s all about government services, one of which involved reindeer. The Federal government had imported them from Siberia, because the elk, seal, bear, and caribou were being wiped out and the natives were starving. The ownership and hunting rights of the reindeer were a problem; were they government property or were they to be owned by the natives under strict conditions? If they were Federal property, what kind of hunting rights did the natives have?

Alaska’s native peoples would bring more issues to court in the 20^th century, again over government services of health and education. Much of Alaska is unincorporated, and of the unincorporated parts within the state’s borders, a lot of it is Federal land. So the people are under Federal jurisdiction, and that brings even more questions.

This is definitely an interesting book, not so much on the subject of Native American rights, but the rights of people living on Federally-owned land, as opposed to that of states or towns.

Introduction to World Religions

Beginning with the origins and philosophy of religion, we learn how faith began with man’s awe and dread of nature and the unknown. Rudolph Otto’s 1917 book on religion’s origins is used to show how all cultures, no matter how far away they are from each other, have similar myths and social taboos. Karl Marx called religion “the sigh of the oppressed creatures”  but at the same time admitted its values. In more than one nation, fish equals prosperity, bread equals sustenance, and the non-predatory dove equals peace.

Some of the religions discussed here are rather obscure in the history books. Viking religion is rarely studied, perhaps because it was practiced by few and didn’t last more than a few centuries. Much of what we know about the Viking gods is based on second hand accounts by German and Arab travelers, with a few more accurate accounts by Icelandic monks. The Norsemen began converting to Christianity by 900, and their paganism was gone by 1100. Did the end of Viking dominance destroy their confidence and lead them to Christianity? Their religion was based on war, so they were not “oppressed” as Karl Marx would say.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam get plenty of attention in this book. They are the three most prominent religions, all involve monotheism, and all three originated in the Middle East. But unlike other books, this one goes deeper, describing the different branches of Christianity throughout the world. But there’s still something missing here. Christianity in the USA is different from that of other countries. Throughout the USA, the Protestants are split into many sects, like Pentacostals, Methodists, Baptists, Jehova’s Witnesses, Mormons, etc. I would like to have seen this discussed in greater detail. Judaism is also practiced differently in the USA than in Britain, and Reform Judaism is very popular here. The Jewish community in Britain has a chief Rabbi, which would horrify the independent Democracy-loving Americans.

There is one religious group here in the USA that gets no mention at all, and that is the Snake Handlers of Tennessee. They’re a tiny sect, but a colorful and dynamic one. I would love to read more about those Christians who worship Jesus by placing venomous snakes in their hands. Perhaps the author doesn’t take them seriously?

Arkansas: A Narrative History

The history of Arkansas is richly detailed in this book as a meeting place for every great change in US history. It’s a humorous story, because some of the supposedly Native American names are actually corruptions of French ones. The French trappers were here before the English speaking settlers, but they were merely after the furs and not interested in farming the land, so they left few marks. Arkansas was a perfect trading post because it sat where two rivers met, and the Natives would trade furs and smoked buffalo meat (ribs were especially popular) for cloth, tools, and weapons.

!830-1865 was a turbulent era, thanks to Indian Removal and then the Civil War. In between were years of violent conflict between pro and anti-slavery forces. Even after the was was over there was conflict between black and white laborers for jobs on the plantations. Freed slaves and their descendants crowded into Little Rock because they were safe from attacks by white mobs, while in the country they were scattered and vulnerable. If Arkansas weren’t the meeting place for major rivers, it probably wouldn’t have much of a history.

Up into the 1950’s it would be the scene of even more famous change, like the Little Rock Nine in 1957, Bill Clinton, Creation v Evolution, Pro-Choice v Pro-Life. Arkansas’ geographic position is no longer as important as it used to be, but it will always be a lynchpin for US history.

Vocations: Answering God's Call

Vocations is all about the role of the commoner in Christianity. The first vocation is where Mary Magdalene is told to go out and tell the people that Jesus has risen. This might not seem like a major step, but keep in mind that women in those days a woman’s testimony was rarely accepted in court. In the event where a witness was required, a woman would not be admitted. Perhaps this is the start of the Christian doctrine, in that it did not discriminate between men and women.

The next chapters deal with the ways in which we honor the Lord in our everyday life, through obedience to Christ’s teaching and ethical behavior. One of the best things about this book is its persuasiveness to young people, through the use of contemporary illustration. Rather than showing the idealized stereotypes, it uses stock photos of people in current fashions, so that teenage readers will think they’re reading about themselves.

As with most books from St. Mary’s Press, I found Vocations to be a very enjoyable read.

Class Rules

Peter Cookson gives reasons why the “classroom as equalizer” idea is a myth. The middle class child goes to a good, spacious school. with good teachers and connections to good colleges. The inner city working class child, however, goes to a cramped, crowded, underfunded, and poorly managed school with no connections to good colleges. The college counselor only hands out applications, and there’s little guidance.

As a former high schools students from a suburban high school I could easily see the difference when I entered an urban school. The difference was in the deference; there was little respect for the teachers or the school, and absolutely no motivation. The middle class suburban youth has college and money on his mind, while the inner city youth doesn’t seem to want to go to school. Most of my classmates went to private colleges or the best public ones, and their parents could afford to pay. My students were accepted into a variety of colleges, some public, some private. But many of them flunked out in the first year because of low skills.

Despite the validity of Cookson’s arguments, I do not agree with all of his points. In New York City, the teachers come from a variety of backgrounds, including public and private colleges. Yet the teachers in the public schools are paid equally regardless of what college they attended, same thing with the police department, corrections, health & hospitals. Cookson’s proofs consist of the Highridge boarding school versus Patrick Henry High School, both in a working class town. The private school is a doorway to great futures, but the local high school has teen pregnancy, drug use, and general failure on all levels. But what is there to stop a poor kid from taking lots of science classes, joining the military, learning a specialty, leaving after a few years, going to college on the GI Bill?

Those of us who read The Other Wes Moore might be convinced that Wes Moore was “saved” by the Valley Forge Military Academy, but I’m not. He was, by his own admittance, a poor academic, and his C average would NOT have gotten him into West Point. Yet he was able to get and officer’s commission anyway just by having a four year college degree. Most parents can’t afford to send their kids to a great military school, but can they even afford to live in a neighborhood with no bad influences?

In the Highridge versus Patrick Henry comparison, the only difference I see is motivation. The townies seem to lack any ambition or initiative whatsoever. I can understand a kid not wanting to go to college, some kids are more physical. If a kid says that she wants to be a chef, mechanic, soldier, sailor, I say that’s wonderful. But the kids in the working class school don’t even seem to want that.

No matter what the author’s point here, I think that the real problem, according to his evidence, is a general suspicion towards academics. If the parents do not want to listen to the people that are trying to help their kids, then what do they expect to get? Why send your kid to high school if you don’t care what happens to them?

New Worlds For All

We’ve had books about the nation’s early settlers. Then came the books about the horrible things the settlers did to the natives. Now we have a book about the way in which the settlers and the natives had their lives intertwined. The first thing this book says is that Jacques Cartier’s men were stuck on the ice, dying of scurvy, until local tribesmen came along and had them drink boiled pine bark. Unfortunately, Cartier’s men brought diseases that wiped out many of these noble ecologists. But the author isn’t that sympathetic; the natives already had diseases (like tuberculosis) and genetic ones from inbreeding.

If you ever take the Long Island Railroad out into Nassau and Suffolk Counties, you’ll find lots of towns with Native American names-Massapequa, Mineola, Hapuage, Montauk, Ronkonkoma, Syosset, and Quog-despite the fact that few Native American live there anymore. As for the change to Native American life, they benefited from the introduction of metal fish hooks and tools. The people of the St. Lawrence region knew right away how to play the French for profit; one beaver useless beaver skin for a bunch of metal knives was more than a bargain to them!

This book is a thoroughly researched and rather humorous study on the Native American v European interaction in the New World. The title is appropriate for the subject, for while we call Plymouth Colony “The New World” it would have been the same for those who encountered these strange new people, with their massive boats and powerful tools. We’re apt to blame European colonization for native destruction, but keep in mind that much of the East Coast was not as densely inhabited as we think. Manhattan Island was mostly empty when Peter Minuit arrived and bought it.

The purchase of Manhattan for a bunch of cheap metal knives may have been an even bigger rip off than revisionists would like us to believe. The Native tribesmen who Peter Minuit bought it from were not native to the island at all. They were just passing through and had no right to it!

All The Buildings In New York

Margaret Thatcher once said “Europe was built on history, but the USA was built on philosophy.” I agree, but our country was built on utility and urgency as much as philosophy. This is evident in the author’s preface of his book, where he compares the buildings of New York with those of Britain and Japan. He recognizes the Harlem stoops from Sesame Street, the fire houses from Ghostbusters, the Brooklyn row houses from Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing, and too bad the city looks nothing today like it did in Kojak, Death Wish, or The taking of the Pelham 1,2,3.

James Gulliver Hancock captures exactly what NYC buildings came from, and that is utility. The tenements of the Lower East Side, with their fire escapes, were meant to be built quickly (and escaped from quickly if there was a fire.) His style of drawing is perfect for the project, and he captures all of the tiny details that make our city’s architecture so unique. He makes 235 Bowery look exactly like it is-a big glass box, or as Prince Charles would say, “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a dear old friend.” Before that entire block was torn down in 2008 it would’ve have been quite a place to draw. But fortunately, now all of the Bowery is gone. It still has just the right touch of seediness.

But old 42^nd Street from the movie Taxi Driver is gone. No more “25 cent peep show” signs. The artist would’ve had a field day with that one.

Energy & Security

“Natural gas is a manic-depressive industry” says David Victor in his essay The Gas Promise. Gas breaks the dependence on oil, but creates new problems. Fracking is a touchy issue here in the USA, and foreign producers could start a cartel. As OPEC tried to strangle the USA in the 1970’s, ONGEC, if such an organization ever happens, could do the same.

Energy & Security is a book of essays by foreign policy experts on the relationship between energy and the nation. William Reilly writes about how safety issues in the drilling industry and how they’re often ignored. He cites the 2010 Gulf of Florida accident as being preceded by others-one in the North Sea and another in Texas City, neither of which lead to any scrutiny of Deepwater Horizon. It’s clear that the energy-desperate USA lets the drillers do as they please.

Amy Myers Jaffe writes on how oil and gas drilling usually happens on Federal lands and waterways (all waterways are Federal property anyway.) When the drilling happens on Federal turf, there’s no state or local input, so that makes it easier on the drillers. Only the Feds can tax it, and since the Federal government is desperate for oil and gas, they’re not going to stand in the way, especially when it frees us from Venezuela’s hold on the oil supply. It’s the same thing in the Canadian Arctic.

The book offers no surprises, because anyone with a modicum of knowledge on the USA’s history in the last 50 years knows how much we depend on oil. But the book delves deep into the relationship between the energy producers and the government.

What Makes Books So Great?

Jo Walton makes a case for rereading books in order to get the essence of the story. His essays are about his favorite books and what he gains by rereading them. His 2010 entry on The Hobbit describes his fascination with this children’s novel. Firstly, the story can be read aloud because of the names (Bilbo Baggins rolls right off the tongue) and the protagonist, though an adult, is very childlike. He has all the freedom of an adult, and absolutely none of the responsibilities. Because he’s of a race of small-statured people, he’s never been under any pressure to be tough. Unlike most fairy tales written for kids, the adult Bilbo has no servants, and if anyone ever noticed, no love interest either. Come to think of it, the characters are all male, and neither Bilbo, nor Gandalf, nor the dwarves encounter any female characters. Bilbo never marries, not in The Hobbit nor the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

There’s only one problem I have with this book. Most of the books he mentions are ones I’ve never heard of!

Obama and China’s Rise

“China should be considered a partner and not an adversary” says author Jeffrey Bader. Smart move perhaps, considering that PRC is the only country capable of handling North Korea. Furthermore, the USA gets the bulk of its manufactured goods from PRC, including the ones that the military and the hospitals are using.

I’m not sure whether to use the term China or PRC. Taiwan also claims the name “China” even though it was called Formosa in the 1800’s. The Chinese aren’t even native to the island, they came as invaders. Should the American press be dictated to about this? Regardless of what Obama does, we’ll need to kiss China’s ass as long as we have to buy from them. Worse, we need them to buy US food, seeing as they’re a huge consumer of US corn, wheat, soy beans, and beef. Obama’s attitude towards the People’s Republic of 

China has been generally on friendly terms, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but the author discusses how a country can get too powerful if they believe they’ll get their way.  The issue of Taiwan is a problem in US-PRC relations. Sure, Taiwan is just a tiny island nation, but they’re also a big source of US goods, but also a buyer of US agricultural products. There’s no way a country like that can be self-sufficient in food. What will Obama do if PRC threatens Taiwan and tells us not to sell them any anti-missile defense weaponry?

It remains to be seen if North Korea has the capabilities that it claims. If it doesn’t, then China’s position will weaken. Next comes China’s threats towards Taiwan; if those threats prove false, same thing. Will the US be held hostage by China, or will we decide for ourselves what country we’ll be friends with? Back in grade school, we all had that kid who said “you can’t be friends with that kid, and if you do then I won’t talk to you anymore.” With China, it’s the same thing. How the US handles it will make all the difference.

Confronting Suburban Poverty in America

The new theory that the suburbs may no longer be ideal could become a college course. I can’t count the number of book I’ve seen in the last two years about this topic, but I’ll name a few-The End of the Suburbs, Walkable City, Cities Are Good For You, The American Way of Poverty, The Metropolitan Revolution-they all have the same message; when the jobs vanish, so does prosperity.

   Confronting Suburban Poverty in America is a detailed and thorough book. In the first chapter the author admits that suburbs can be great, with low crime, good schools, and clean air. But nowadays the public services like sanitation, law enforcement, building code enforcement, are in trouble. Lack of property tax is part of the problem, now that houses are being abandoned. Lakewood (outside Cleveland) isn’t the usual bedroom community; the houses are closely spaced and there are lots of two family homes. But with the houses sitting empty, there’s less tax to pay for the police and fire departments. Some blame factory closings, others blame subprime loans. Regardless, the neighborhood is in deep trouble.

    I wonder sometimes if prosperity is the reason for this? Perhaps the former “working class” have moved on to better neighborhoods, leaving the little old wooden houses empty.  Look at St. Louis, for instance; whole neighborhoods torn down, leaving the area looking more like a street-vectored field. Who wants to live in a run-down neighborhood with no jobs if they could get a better deal in Atlanta? Or perhaps Orlando? Or maybe the kids move to the city for college and stay? Keep in mind that a lot of the troubled suburbs were really subdivisions, built on speculation. Jim Lynch Drive in Elberon, NJ, is one such example. The houses today are unoccupied.

    But there is hope, according to this book. Detroit has begun tearing down abandoned homes, so that they won’t burn and make work for the fire department. The Cuyahoga Bank in Cleveland (non-profit) buys vacant houses and refurbishes or demolishes them. But other than that, there’s not much you can do and things look bleak. There are lots of things a city council can do, but not if they can’t agree. The suburbs were all grassland, woods, and swamps before the houses came along. They’ll be that way once again after the people are all gone.

Trizics by Gordon Cameron

Triz (rhymes with trees) is a problem-solving method used by engineers. Gordon Cameron, an engineer from Glasgow, Scotland, has written this book to help engineers avoid the pitfalls of understanding algorithms. He does, of course, stress the use of traditional problem-solving and decision-making theories before thinking out of the box.

Trizics uses diagrams to help explain the methods in this book. The Nine Windows Diagram allows you to analyze the past and future of a situation in order to better understand the main idea. It can be applied to determine future costs, how quickly things will wear out, and whether a given material is useful to the project, or harmful and excessive.

The Rich Don't Always Win

Can a rich family end up poor? It happened in The Senator and the Socialite; the Bruce family started out rich in the 1800’s, ended up on welfare in the 1940’s. They were landowners with no skills or special talent, and their money ran out after 80 years. Their rich and powerful friends deserted them, and the jobs that they’d gotten thanks to social class dried up. Today their descendants are doctors, lawyers, and teachers.  They’re now “regular” people. But keep in minds that the courts look at the “gentle” folk differently than the lower classes.

Sam Pizzigati discusses the history of class warfare in the USA, starting with the muckracking years of the late 1800’s, and devotes half the book to the New Deal. But the 1950’s don’t get much coverage, and that was an era where working class families could finally own houses. Perhaps it was a time of greater equality? The New Deal may very well have been a response to the wealthy families messing around with free enterprise, but what about the middle class politicians who insisted on useless tariffs? We blame the 

Depression on the stock market, but the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs are now known to have made it worse.

I do fault the author for missing a vital point; the rich do often win in the USA! Look at Michael Moore’s Roger & Me as an example. When the auto plants in Michigan closed, the owner simply packed up and left. He wouldn’t lose his home, because his company’s loans weren’t borrowed against it. If that’s not a convincing example, there’s the pharmaceutical magnate who persuaded Connecticut to let him demolish homes through “eminent domain.”

The Power In Your Hands

I once gave some 11^th graders what I thought would be an interesting  assignment; read an article about Somali pirates and compare it to the entry on Caribbean pirates from their textbook. When the essays came back, most of them were gobble-de-gook. Sentences began with the word “and,” things that should have been used as a conclusion were in the middle, and sentences were written on top of each other because the student “forgot” and had to jam them in. This was an inner-city school, and while the kids were not without intelligence, they were seriously lacking in any kind of writing skill.

The Power In Your Hands give step-by-step instructions on how to teach kids to write. One of the biggest problems with high school writing is that the kids’ essays are usually all over the place, and as most teachers will agree, they have trouble putting their thoughts together coherently. This book stresses formats for essays, book reports, and other writings for kids.

The chapter Persuasion is about opinion v fact. The author tries to explain it as a kid who tries to get his friends to eat pizza instead of hamburgers. She starts with the “main idea” and proceeds  to meatier ways to build and essay. For bigger assignments, there’s brainstorming, research, creating the intro, and adjusting the body paragraphs. The section on proofreading marks might be a little too much for high schoolers, however. But the last chapter on expository writing is important for most grades. Comparisons and metaphors are covered extensively, and one cannot understress their importance if the students has any desire to prove his or her opinion in their writing.

If your students have any intention of going to a four year college, they’d better be able to write. If the assignment is “compare your family Thanksgiving dinner to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” then they’d better be able to write it coherently. The professor won’t give a damn if a 19 year old never learned to write, it’s not his problem. If your kid has an opinion, great, but if he/she can’t put it to paper, then college is not going to go well.

New York City: A Food Biography

My father’s stories of 1970’s New York aren’t about food. According to him, you couldn’t find anywhere near the kind of restaurants you have now. Back then you had Italian places, Chinese, delis, diners, some fancy ones like Le Cirque, hole-in-the-wall cafes, but none of the exotic stuff that New Yorkers are used to. Watch any movie about pre-90’s NY and you’ll see what I mean. Read Box Office Poison, and it’s the same thing; they eat in diners or Italian restaurants. Ethnic foods like Indian, Arab, or Japanese cooking were a rarity. So what was the food like here 200 years ago?

The trendiest restaurants like to advertise “fresh ingredients” that obviously come from out of the city. But in the early days, the fresh ingredients could be found only a few miles away. Street carts served clams and oysters from New York’s waterways, and the roasted chestnuts were picked from native trees that grew all over the east coast. If you ate rabbit, pheasant, or venison, it was killed locally. Then pollution killed the local clams, and a fungus killed all the native chestnut trees in the late 1800’s.

If you look at photos of old New York, you’ll see that the menu signs are very basic. The average café served steak, potatoes, eggs and bacon, toast and coffee, ham sandwiches, chops, sausages, etc. 1950’s New Yorkers weren’t exotic eaters, but according to this book, as lot if it has to do with economics. Since 1990, younger New Yorkers have been more keen to try exotic foods, leading to the popularity of Indian, Thai, Arab, and Korean restaurants. When the economy went sour after 2008, entrepreneurs flooded the market, and food trucks proliferated.

The book could use some photos or illustrations to go with the text. I would also have liked to see more first person accounts of the city’s eating habits, and there are plenty of longtime residents who’d be happy to tell their stories. There is also an archive of old restaurant menus at SUNY’s New Paltz campus, which were collected by Oscar Tchirky, the maitre’d at the old Waldorf hotel. I would love to see what those pre-1920 menus had to offer, given the tastes of the time.

Soho had a growth in gourmet food stores in the early 1980’s,which are heavily discussed in Relish by Lucy Knisley. Some information on early restaurants, like Sloppy Louie’s would be welcome too.

Foundations of Behavioral Pharmacology by Dr. Neurosci

The science of using drugs to treat behavioral disorders is described here in perfect detail. From the beginning, the author is clear that the drugs effect the brain differently, and while you’ll be impulse to say “well duh!” listen to this; a low dose of Epinephrine will make your blood pressure drop, but a higher dose will increase it. This is one of the tricky factors in prescribing medications to a patient. The dosage has to be carefully monitored, because not all drugs have the “greater dose, greater effect.”

The chapter on hallucinogens was interesting because it discusses the notion of “absorption” in the effects of the drugs. Mescaline, for instance, doesn’t get digested by the liver, so the effects last longer. Others, like PCP, have few problems with absorption,  but create more delirium than anesthesia, which is why it was taken off the market. Then again, there have been many drugs that didn’t work. Anybody remember Thalidomide?

Though I think this is a wonderful book, I would like to have seen some photos of how patients are effected by the drugs. While this book is a serious piece of medical literature, it could also be formatted for the less “educated” crowd, and become a rather entertaining book on drugs. I can just see a version of this book titled Meds and full of stylish illustrations of all the medications described in this book.

Nick Hornby: Ten Years In The Tub

Nick Hornby is a book critic for Believer Magazine, and this book collects ten years of his columns. He writes like an English eccentric, gravitating to books that he considers eccentric. For instance, his review of Jane Tomalin’s biography of Thomas Hardy focuses on Hardy’s heart (yes, the organ) and its burial, while the rest of the body was cremated and the ashes kept in Westminster Abbey.

In the same chapter he reviews Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning. Anyone who’s read it knows that it bears zero resemblance to anything to do with Thomas Hardy or English romanticism (more like a Wild West story) or eccentricity. Then again, you have colorful characters like Bella Abzug, Ed Koch, Reggie Jackson, George Steinbrenner, and Mario Cuomo. Perhaps you could call Bella Abzug a bit of an eccentric?

Unfortunately, most of the reviews were not as interesting. Believer  Magazine is largely hit-or-miss; either you like it or you don’t. Unless you’re a longtime Nick Hornby fan, you might not like this book that much.