The Bruce Lee Way

   I want to make it clear to you that I am not a Bruce Lee fan. I never liked his movies (or any other Hong Kong action movie for that matter) with their elaborately choreographed fight scenes, silly sound effects, wooden sets, and predictable plots. What impresses me is the amazing physical talent that he had, which other martial artists have rarely been able to duplicate. Aside from his talents, he has an important place in history; he was probably the first Chinese instructor to make Kung Fu available to Americans.

This book draws from Lee’s own writings, along with secondhand accounts and expert theories. First comes his weight training regimen, for which he kept a detailed journal. He carefully charted his weight training exercises, which may have been a sign of obsessive behavior. The author believes that Lee’s entry into California sparked his interest in weight training, because California (especially LA) has a culture of fitness and health food going back to the 1920’s. This weight training regimen was alternated, with cardio on one day and weights on the next day. Lee wrote that he found it monotonous, but it was the routine that guaranteed results. We see in this book some photos of his journals, written in perfect cursive; no small asset in terms of mindfulness.

Bruce Lee was a philosopher as well as a martial artist. He incorporated a huge amount of scholarship into his work, and not just the Confucius or Sun Tzu volumes that were available at the local public library. In the chapter titled Making Your Own Path, he incorporated multiple fighting styles, comparing US and European boxing, along with Indian Yoga. The use of only one fighting discipline was, in his eyes, to constricting, and he regarded the style fusion the way he did with philosophy, always learning new things. There’s a humorous letter where Lee writes “if you think you’re beaten, you are.” I can see that this Kung Fu master had been reading the works of Kipling!

Despite his fame, Lee wasn’t into self-aggrandizement, basing his approach on Confucian ethics of personal humility. He gave lessons to anyone who was interested, and he put a huge amount of comedy into his movies. Take for example The Way of the Dragon, where his character keeps goofing up thanks to his ignorance of Italian and even worse ignorance of Italian social norms. Every joke is on him, and he put pauses in between the dialogue to give the audience time to laugh.

There is another aspect of Lee’s work that the author doesn’t expressly say, and that is the equality between races. In the early 1960’s, there were a sizable number of Chinese instructors who would not take non-Chinese students, especially Black American, but Lee set no bar for race or color. His was a strict meritocracy, and if you could prove yourself, you went straight to the top. One possibility is that he learned lessons from being a minority, or maybe his attitude of inclusion was a rejection of constraint? As a rebellious youth in Hong Kong, he would have been eager to break out of constraint, and the West Coast, where he migrated, has always been a hotbed of holistic living. Away from the strict patriarchal ways of his homeland, he would’ve had fewer examples to follow.

Bruce Lee’s life has many elements worth studying. He was born on an Island that was 99% Chinese, owned by Britain, and flooded with craftsmen and businessmen after 1948. He was a skilled dancer, which may have aided his martial arts ability, and he had a great sense for business when it came to using his skills. It’s said that on his way to California, he made money giving Cha-Cha lessons to wealthy passengers in first-class, so he would have something to fall back on when he arrived. He would’ve taken flak from Kung Fu traditionalists, who weren’t keen on teaching outsiders, but at the same time, what were the traditionalists doing for him? He was on his own in California, with no family for support. It is unfortunate that his life ended at age 33, just as he was making his biggest appeal to American audiences. He broke stereotypes with his role of Kato in the Green Hornet, pushing his way out of the submissive Asian servant boy and forcing audiences to put up with his ass-kicking chauffeur.

If only Bruce Lee had lived long enough to write a Bill Bryson style comparison of Chinese and American habits.

All Souls: A family Story From Southie

   In 2000, when this book was getting rave reviews in the papers, I couldn’t believe any of it. First off, I’d never heard of Irish-Americans living in urban housing projects, so that was a bit of a shock. Secondly, I had a hard time believing that anybody could feel any affection for a horrible neighborhood. I wondered why the author’s community was full of single welfare mothers, when birth control was available. Why were they all on welfare, when Boston had jobs? Why would they choose to stay in a high-crime area? Had they never heard of white privilege? The reason I couldn’t believe the story is that I had only been to Boston once, and I’d never seen the Old Colony housing projects. When I asked my friends from Boston about it, they said they’d never seen it, but they knew it was there. This is precisely the issue explored in the book; South Boston’s public housing was not a secret, but if you didn’t live there, you didn’t go there. As for the residents, they distrusted everyone.

   The story begins in the early 1970’s, when the author was six years old and the youngest of eight children (more would follow later.) The family, headed by their matriarch Helen MacDonald, faced two major catastrophes at the time; inside the apartment, the oldest son had a mental breakdown, and out in the street, there were the anti-busing riots. The author attributes his brother’s mental deterioration to a horrible childhood; taking most of the father’s beatings, finding his baby brother dead in the crib, and though the author doesn’t say it, the mother’s behavior may have been part of the problem. Couple that with living in a hopeless neighborhood, where fighting is the norm, and it all adds up.

   As I mentioned in the beginning, I couldn’t believe any of it at first, which I attribute to my own ignorance. Though I’d been studying US history for years by the time I read this book, I knew nothing of the Boston Busing riots (it wasn’t covered in most college history books.) The problem with Boston is that the busing riots were a major issue in the history of civil rights, but they came at a time when the movement was splintering. The actual idea of exchanging poor black and white Boston students wasn’t even the work of Dr. King or Jesse Jackson, but white ivory-tower liberals like Ted Kennedy. It wasn’t fair on any level, especially since Ted Kennedy’s kids went to private school. All over South Boston you had the graffiti “bus Ted’s kids” while nothing good came out of desegregational school busing. The black schools in Roxbury and the white schools in Dorchester were still lousy. Did any of the liberals think that maybe the parents, regardless of their color, didn’t want this? Did they ask if the kids wanted this? It doesn’t seem as though the liberal establishment cared about the freedom of choice.

    MacDonald recounts his view of the busing riots, and his siblings’ own violent role. The protests had taken on an extreme racist tone, the likes of which you weren’t even seeing in the Deep South anymore. There is an earlier book of photos by Eugene Richards, titled Dorchester Days, with good clear photos of these events. White youth march with racist banners, smiling red-haired teens wear KKK placards, and who could forget the infamous photo “The Soiling of Old Glory” among the images of the events. One thing that the author of All Souls doesn’t mention, though he implies, is the neglect of education in the South Boston area. Reading this book, and seeing the photos by Eugene Richards, I have to wonder if any of these kids cared enough about their schooling to want to protest. How many of them would simply drop out regardless? How many of them ever put in a full day at school?

    Shortly after this book came out, I went to hear the author speak. He explained that in his opinion, South Boston could’ve been a very functional working-class community, if not for all the things that worked against it. The first problem was that the people in Southie didn’t trust the police, nor the media. Secondly, the politicians were a problem; the leftists used them as a racist scapegoat, and the right wing exploited their clannish anti-liberal mentality. The irony is that the conservatives, whom the residents usually voted for, were anti-welfare, but almost all the people in the projects were on welfare.  The next irony is that the right wing was tough on drug crime, but Southie had a huge drug problem. The mothers would say they were against free sex, but not one of the households had the father present, and despite the mothers being fervently Catholic, most of their kids were born out of wedlock. The clannish, anti-outsider mentality allowed criminals like Whitey Bulger to exploit the people; he extorted local businesses, scared outsiders from doing business in the neighborhood, and sold the drugs that were killing the kids.

    Over the years, Amazon reviews have been mixed. Some say the author’s neighborhood was the problem, other say that the family had problems long before they showed up. The mother, perpetually hooking up with bad men, comes off as incompetent, despite the author claiming otherwise. She marries an abusive man, has one child after another, fails to protect the children from him, then he leaves, and she shacks up with another irresponsible man, has two kids with him (one of whom dies in infancy) and then ten years later she does it again. MacDonald recounts an incident where they go to his grandmother’s funeral, and his grandfather yells at them to leave, not wanting bastard children in his home. Is the grandfather being horrible, or is he just fed up with his irresponsible daughter? The grandparents lived in a better part of the town, so I have to wonder if this story is an example of downward mobility?

    Several of the MacDonald kids ended up dead, from illness, crime, or suicide. The oldest spends his teen years in mental hospitals, then jumps off the roof, and one of his sisters does the same thing while high on drugs and ends up brain damaged. Some of them do, however, get out of Southie and have normal lives; one becomes a nurse, one goes to Tuft’s University and joins the navy, and the author eventually gets a job, yet he stays in the neighborhood. His mother moves to Colorado in the early 1990’s and tries to have a normal life, but I can’t get over the way she neglects her kids. Why did she need to keep shacking up with irresponsible men? She goes to college, but she never tries to use her education to get anything better in life. In the part of the book that looked like a real window of hope, she’s befriended by an African-American librarian, who says to her “I got my high school diploma and got off welfare.” The author, a small child at this point, says that he was always trying to impress this woman, and I can see how that makes sense; the women in his neighborhood were all nasty and disgusting, some of them would walk around without wearing menstrual pads, others were always yelling expletives at their kids. This librarian was probably the only woman he knew who wasn’t a filthy skank.

    In some ways, this book shows us how the Civil Rights Movement went off the rails after Dr. King’s murder. It was Dr. King’s intention for children of both colors to attend the same schools, not for them to exchange schools! Somehow, I bet the people in Boston were crying out “why is it only Boston that has to do this, and not New York, Miami, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles?!?” The busing didn’t benefit anyone economically either, because it was basically two poor districts exchanging kids. The poor Blacks of Roxbury and the poor Whites in Dorchester could’ve united to effect change, but that wouldn’t happen, thanks to their attitudes, and the politicians too. At his book talk back in 2000, the author said that a better solution would’ve been to bus both colors to a school on neutral territory.

    Most of the antiquated and crumbling South Boston housing projects are gone now, replaced by mixed-income housing, more in line with Boston’s traditional architecture. The remaining projects are racially integrated, because the authorities got smart and stopped letting applicants be choosy about race. The author’s siblings are now scattered across the country, and the area he grew up in is heavily gentrified.

    The book could use a few additions, however. Some maps would be in order because the location of the Old Colony projects played a major part in how they ended up, along with some better photos of the area, and a timeline. It is one of the many books on poverty, but one of the few that are still in print and being widely read, along with Nickel and Dimed , and the recent Hillbilly Elegy. The difference between All Souls and Hillbilly Elegy is that MacDonald’s family were second or third generation Americans, while J.D. Vance’s family had been living in Kentucky for over a century. While the MacDonald family was downwardly mobile, Vance’s family had always been that way; the poverty was generational.

Brooklyn: The Once and Future City

    Thomas Campanella, Cornell professor of urban planning, treats Brooklyn as a borough of missed opportunities. Jamaica Bay didn’t become a world-class seaport; Floyd Bennett Field is defunct; the canoe harbor at Marine Park never happened. Nevertheless, Brooklyn has a remarkable history when it comes to building, and much of it was built on dredged sand and reclaimed marshland. Unfortunately, Brooklyn was often treated as expendable.

    Expendability, in Campanella’s extensive history of Brooklyn, is best illustrated in the chapter titled The Island of Offal and Bones. The place in question is Barrier Island, a deforested stretch of salt march where the city processed dead animals. Boatloads of dead dogs, cats, and rats, ended up there, along with circus animals, and trolley horses when they were too old to be of use. The non-unionized beasts of burden were shipped there to be skinned for leather, butchered for dog food (or even sausage, perhaps) and de-boned for fertilizer and glue. Needless to say, the overpowering stench, along with the waste dumped into the stagnant waterways, did little to improve the area.

    The author devotes a full chapter to Brooklyn’s military contribution, long before the US entered the wars. Hundreds of pilots got their first lessons at Floyd Bennett Field, and it was a staging area for planes manufactured on the East Coast. Flying boats were staged in the area during WWII, in between sea patrols for German U-boats. However, both FBF and the Brooklyn Navy Yard illustrate another problem with the borough; both of them became obsolete after WWII, as the Navy Yard was too small, and the airfields were too short. Then the labor strikes crippled Brooklyn’s businesses, starting with the breweries, and it spread to other businesses as well. Industrialists packed their bags for states where unions were less favored by the government, or where land was cheaper. Then came urban renewal, which saw the American Safety Razor factory torn down and replaced by Metrotech. Goodbye factory, goodbye jobs.

    Not much is given to modern Brooklyn, now the great American yuppie zone. In a funny twist on the “lost industry” problem, there’s Bob Rosensweig’s vintage lightbulb company that’s now all the rage. Bar and restaurant patrons prefer the warm, intimate light to the sterile flicker of today’s energy saver bulbs. However, in an equally ironic twist, some folks like to eat in dirty old restaurants, lit by the old-school fluorescent bubs that give the place an ugly greenish glow. I would like to read more about how the artistic crowd reclaimed Brooklyn, though it was profiled in an earlier book titled The Last Bohemia. There could also be a chapter on how Brooklyn is portrayed in literature and film. Some book portray the positives of the community (like Chaim Potok’s novels) while others give you the sleazy side (like Hubert Selby Jr) or a combination of the good, bad, and bohemian (like Paul Auster). However, I am reminded of a 1994 graphic novel, Box Office Poison, that takes place in Brooklyn. The hero (or perhaps, loser) of the story, Sherman Davies, is a recent Hunter College graduate, working  in a dying old Mom & Pop bookstore, right before Barnes and Noble took over. He moves into a shared apartment in Carrol Gardens, and he sees how the neighborhood is very quiet and easygoing, and that’s how he wants it. While moving his books upstairs, he and his friends wonder “is Carrol Gardens going to be the new Seattle, or the new Des Moines?” Sherman responds with “the first flannel shirt I see, and I’m moving to Des Moines!” Not all young people want things to be “hip” or trendy.

   I applaud Campanella for his extensive research and unbiased writing. It’s a treasure trove of history and a bag of dirty laundry at the same time. Some of his sources came from the New York Times, others came from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Brooklyn hasn’t had much in the way of daily papers, ever since The City Sun closed in 1996, and I suspect that The City Sun might’ve been a trove of history in itself (if the defunct paper has been archived, which I don’t know.) Whether Brooklyn will become a great community, or an unwanted backwater, or a place with a huge rich-poor divide, this book will be an indicator.

  

Diversity Inc.

    In the preface, Pamela Newkirk debunks what she considers the myth of diversity and integration in the elite fields. She brings up two questions with regards to diversity; the first is how and why diversity is lagging, and secondly, why the White elites believe statistics, which the author claims are distorted and exaggerated.  In the first chapter she blames in on President Reagan cutting Federal money for job training, though I add that Reagan blames minority unemployment on minimum wage increases (as did economists like Milton Friedman.) Then she brings up an issue – museums having few Black curators – which I agree with wholeheartedly. I’ve been to museums all over the USA, and I saw lots of Black security guards, and but few in positions of management. The author makes this a race issue, but I would have to disagree, based on my experience and observation. If you look up any museum online, you will see that the curatorial staff have degrees in history, art history, and lots of unpaid internships in museums. It’s not a field for someone who has to work to earn money during the summer. Furthermore, a major art museum is going to prefer someone who went to a top college, not community college. Let’s face it, being a museum curator is an “ivory tower” kind of career.

    Newkirk writes that few Black Americans head a daily paper (probably true) or get an Oscar. But is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences the only judge of talent? She doesn’t mention whether Black actors, writers, and directors get prizes at other festivals, like Sundance, Telluride, Tribeca, Cannes, Moscow, Berlin, Venice, etc. You also have to think in terms of geography; The Oscars are in LA, home of the Hollywood studios, while directors like Spike Lee take their cameras outdoors on the East Coast. He and other directors – Scorsese, Jarmusch, Alexander Paine – make their movies far away from LA, so it’s not surprising that they’re going to be closed out of the Hollywood cliques. The Oscars are essentially a child of the Hollywood system.

    Here are some things that I find missing from this book. First, I would like to know if job applicants are rejected from jobs on account of race. If an office has one Black employee, does that mean they have closed hiring practices, or does it mean that no Black men or women applied? Next, let’s take stock of how many Black school principals there are in major cities, then see how many of them head a racially integrated school. If the results are sparse, does that mean the White parents don’t want a Black American principal in their kids’ school? Then we can wonder why there are so many Black American correction officers in the NYCDOC, and few Whites. If more Whites entered, would there be an uproar over White people taking Black jobs? There are some trades, like construction, that are dominantly White, but is that because of racism, or because Poles and Albanians only hire their own? The same thing holds true for the jewelry industry, famously dominated by Hasidic Jews. Should we attribute the lack of Black gem cutters to racism, or because the Hasidic jewelers in NYC, Tel Aviv, and Antwerp, only train their own?

    Sorry Ms. Newkirk, but your book falls short. You failed to research enough fields to find out why Black Americans are underrepresented. If your research were more extensive, then you might have found instances of genuine racism, and your book might be the start of change in the USA.

Oxford by Matthew Rice

   Matthew Rice, with his beautiful illustrations of Oxford architecture, reminds me of an earlier book titled 750 Years of Paris. In a city with old buildings, the history is preserved, not only to show the city’s origins, but how it has changed over the years. In this book, the watercolor illustrations of Oxford buildings go from the earliest standing structures, to the modern era. We learn how the city was dominated by the famous school from its earliest days, and how the students and teachers were a major influence on the community. He writes how Oxford is ringed with green pastures, and since it never industrialized, it avoided the pollution and overcrowding of the other English cities. One other blessing of non-industrialization is the lack of crime.

   This book teaches us a lot about how and why Britain retained its storied history. Take for example Godstow Abbey, of which only a wall remains. The ruins sit in a field and haven’t been torn down, so it remains there as a reminder of what the town used to be. One reason for its posterity is that there was no building boom (no factories means no housing demand) so nobody was desperate to clear the land. Then you had the landowners, who liked having mock ruins, or “follies,” in their gardens, so having a real ruin was even better. At the most recent, you have the National Trust, set up to preserve the lands and ancient homes (or take them off the hands of dirt-poor aristocrats who can’t pay the inheritance tax).

    Differences in architecture abound in the city of Oxford. Christchurch Cathedral is built in the Gothic style, with arches, columns, flying buttresses, and huge windows, while St. Cross and St. Ebbe’s are built in the earlier Saxon style after the Norman conquest of England. The Saxon style has similarities to Romanesque architecture, with heavy doors, thick walls, small windows, lack of décor, and a generally defensive structure. Their sturdy build is in line with their second use as a secure building, as the Saxon and Norman eras were a period of instability. 

   In another nod to history, England’s architects were often loath to let go of old styles, which is why some of the houses look older than they are. The Beaumont Street houses were all built in the 1820’s, and designed to look like the St. Gile’s houses, built a century earlier. No. 78 Woodstock road, built in 1892, looks a lot like Hampton Court Palace; it has red brick walls, peaked windows, and a stone arch entrance. Oxford’s free-standing stone towers were part of the city walls but were left behind when the walls were torn down years ago. Over the years they’ve been refurbished with new material, but their original styles remain. My research shows that in the 1800’s, the Church of England sold off a lot of the small old churches, and the new owners kept them intact. Many of the older churches have been converted to restaurants, preschools, and gift shops. You can say that oxford’s buildings are a curious mix of old and new.

    The illustrations have a very warm and intimate tone, less of an architectural drawing and more of a children’s book illustration. I think that the author could do a version of this as a picture book, to teach children about Oxford’s history.

Organized Money by Keith Mestrich and Mark Pinsky

   Robert Kiyosaki, in his Rich Dad books, says that the rich can make their money work for them. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe half of what Kiyosaki says but he has a point here; of you have a strong grasp of how money works, then you have a strong chance of sustainability. If you think of loans (or worse, credit cards) as a money tree, they you’ll lose the game. You have to know where the money goes.
    Both of the authors of Organized Money are financial experts, working towards the goal of community development through money management. Throughout the book they give you a tour of anti-conservativism, and a strong dislike for President Reagan’s policies in the 1980’s. They describe him as having wiped out all of the New Deal programs, especially the ones that regulated banks and prevented interdependence. However, they are not so warm to President Clinton either, because he signed further legislation that further deregulated the banks.

   I don’t agree with a lot of their opinions, however. They write that conservatives oppose a woman’s right to choose, racial integration, and the extension of personal rights. But what about the conservative who does in fact support women’s rights, yet opposes spending public money on a Women’s Studies program at a state college? What about the America who has no problem with non-traditional gender roles, and doesn’t object to a boy wearing a dress to school, but is irked at having to find gender-neutral books for the school library? Does that make the person a sexist?

    Another theme of this book is the notion of “be wary, government help comes with a price.” They use, as an example, President Trump’s Investing in Opportunity Act of 2017. Why would the most conservative president in history want such a program? Why would Trump, of all people, want to invest in low-income communities? The answer is that he doesn’t! It’s just another way for him to exert (conservative) government control over how the money is spent on a low-income community. Those who assume the money will go to daycare and preschool, will find the money going to the county jail. However, I do believe it was the (conservative) President Reagan who warned us to beware of anyone who says “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

   These guys give no usable advice on how to make the system work for progressives. They make no mention of how to avoid bad debt, nor do they advise against money-wasters like credit cards and Christmas shopping sprees. Have they been to Kmart (or FAO Schwartz, or Walmart) in the week before Christmas and seen people filling their carts with junk? With loads of gifts for other people? Things that will end up never being used? All of this while struggling to pay the rent? It’s a sad thing to see, and even sadder to see how these two financial experts wasted their time on this rant of a book. Better they should use their time to start a financial counseling program for the poor.

Kids At Work by Emir Estrada

   Few American teenagers have jobs these days; some blame it on the decline of retail, and others blame it on kids having too much homework. Emir Estrada, in an extensive study, finds that this is not the case with the children of Hispanic immigrants, often in this country illegally. In Los Angeles, a sizeable number of Hispanic kids work as vendors, under their parents’ tutelage, and still graduate high school. Though they attend school full-time, they spend afternoons and weekends minding the stalls (rarely licensed) and contribute to the household income, rarely cutting into their schoolwork. Though he believes the ethnic and cultural backgrounds are not the sole explanation for this phenomenon, he does find that it exists almost entirely among the Hispanic population, not the Chinese, Indians, Armenians, or Koreans in Los Angeles.

    This book got me thinking about the work-versus-school choice in this world, often debated in the UN. The image of third-world kids working instead of going to school always leaves us outraged, and why wouldn’t it? Why would anyone think it fair, that a teenager should have to work instead of going to school, losing any chance of a good future, and probably not even getting to enjoy the money he/she makes? But on the streets of LA, Hispanic teens are working and doing well in school. The author interviews a 13-year-old girl, who says that her peers have too much time on their hands, and it gets them in trouble. Her afterschool vending teaches her to communicate, focus, be aware, measure, keep accounts, be responsible for the goods, and stick to a schedule. While she (and other teen vendors) acknowledge that there are rude customers, the kids learn a valuable skill – communicating with adult professionals – which will serve the kids well in college applications and job interviews.

   One of the teen vendors, Adriana, allowed Estrada to print her schedule, listing her school arrival/departure times, he daily location of her stall (staggered, probably to avoid the cops) and the revenue for each day. While some kids make fun of her, most of them envy her. The chapter titled If I Don’t Help, Then Who Will is all about juggling work, school, and caring for siblings, and it can be highly educational. Some of the teens, like 18 year old Martha, lament the lack of leisure in their lives, especially since her classmates are all rich! She goes to a Catholic school, which her father pays for in full, and her vending gig allows him to devote his whole paycheck to her tuition and the mortgage. Her classmates assume her father is a drug dealer because she won’t say what he does, but at the same time, she has no idea how screwed up the Valley kids can be!

    I’d like to recount from personal experience, how I saw the results of kids having no work at all. A thirteen-year-old, from a rich family, had everything except skills. When it came time to apply to high schools, the essays were all about “afterschool activities that show dedication to learning” or “a skill that you could teach to others,” or “solving a serious problem on your own.” Now let’s see, what could this boy do? Playing Fortnite online was not going to impress the principal, nor would softball. He couldn’t cook, do laundry, or shop for groceries. In every upper-class family, it was the same thing; they spent all their time at school and homework, the housekeeper did the chores, and they spent their time playing video games, skateboarding, online, or in front of the tv. But then I had a student, Maria, who lived in a crammed apartment with her extended family, and had to help out in her father’s store. She wrote her essay about taking inventory, keeping the books, signing for deliveries, stacking the rack, cleaning floors, cleaning the sidewalk, getting rid of the bums, painting over graffiti, and sorting the produce. Needless to say, she had offers from a lot of good high schools.

    Remember the scene from Back to School, where Rodney Dangerfield schools the snobby professor on how to really run a business? Remember how the other students all turn to him and start taking notes, while he talks about all the under-the-table wrangling needed to build a factory? The reason he knows more than the professor of business is that he’s the only one there who’s ever been in business! If you go to an Ivy League school, the professors are all lifelong academics, but in a working class community college, the professors are all industry professionals. Your local junior college has instructors who have current work experience with the subjects they teach, and they know the score. This book dwells on the question of whether or not a young American can juggle work and good grades, and after reading this book, I say the answer is yes, they can! The reason they do well in school is that they have more to write about. They do well in math because they have to keep the accounts. They do well in social studies because they experience every known personality. They impress their teachers because they are not lazy. Let’s face it folks, work makes your schoolwork better.