Too Much and Never Enough by Mary Trump

 

An old friend of mine worked at one of the Trump buildings, back when gullible Americans were fawning over Trump’s reality tv show. How was it? He describes Trump’s head chef taunting him with racist jokes, and Matthew Calimari (Trump’s gigantic head of security turned head of operations) intimidating everyone. Intimidating? Calimaria (a rather large man, btw) would turn to employee #1 and say, “You gonna train him?” The lackey would say, “Mister Calimari, you know I always give you my best.” The big man would turn to lackey #2 and say, “What’re you gonna do?” The big man, with his big moustache, would get the same answer, then call you to his office to make you wait. Regardless of what you were there for, he’d make you wait as a matter of policy. Now I have to wonder, why is everyone in the Trump corporation such an asshole? Why are they always looking for ways to make themselves feel powerful? Does Donald Trump hire bullies? I wonder how he kept his machine going. Why did bans keep lending him money? Why did the TV networks shower him with attention? The author, Trump’s niece, makes that clear in the prologue: How did Donald Trump get away with it for so long?

Mary Trump holds nothing back in her disdain for her family. She describes her grandfather, Fred Trump Sr, as an abusive racist and a male chauvinist, and her grandmother, a poor Scottish immigrant, as selfish and classist. But she also makes her grandmother look weak and incompetent. Did her grandfather, an abusive domineering man, find himself attracted to Mrs. Trump’s fragility? Then there’s her father, Fred Trump Jr, who she describes as weak and incompetent as well. After college, he worked for his father in property management, but found that it didn’t suit him. He joined the Air National Guard, became a pilot for TWA, and found himself rebelling against his father. Pilots were held in high regard in the 1960’s, but Trump Sr. considered them nothing more than bus drivers. You would think that this man would laugh off his father’s criticism, but he didn’t. Fred Trump Jr. really took it to heart, even worse when his younger brother Donald was sent to deliver the message from their father. Soon Fred Jr.’s drinking worsened, he lost his TWA job, fell back in with his father, and was treated like dirt for the rest of his life.

You would think Fred Jr.’s wife would say, “Screw your father, stick with flying,” but the man was so weak that he couldn’t resist the pull of his father’s black hole. For the rest of his life, it would be low-level positions, managing his father’s low-quality buildings in Queens, living in the building’s worst apartments, dying broken and alone. Mary Trump speculates that her grandfather, in typically hateful Trump fashion, kept her father from getting loans to buy a home or start a business. Whether or not it’s true, it seems as though Fred Sr. enjoyed watching his son fail. Why would he trash his son’s career as a pilot, when the country’s elite (which Fred Sr. fancied himself a part of) considered it a top-dog life? Why would he insist on his son returning to the family business, if all he would let his son do was be a building superintendent? Perhaps Fred Sr. needed a weak son to abuse so that he could feel powerful?

There is a possible reason for the failure of Fred Jr’s career, not mentioned in the book. Fred Jr. was an Air National Guard pilot, who’d never flown in combat, or even been in the service full-time, so he would’ve been very low on the pilot totem pole. The airlines recruited from the Air Force and Navy first, then the Air National Guard, then the flying school. Did he feel disrespected by his fellow pilots, most of whom had probably flown in the Korean War? Was he relegated to local flights, while the military veterans flew across the Atlantic? There’s a scene in the story where Donald and Robert Trump spend the weekend at their brother’s house, and they disrespect not only their older brother, but his wife too. Why was it tolerated? Why couldn’t Fred Jr. just say, “Are you both nuts? Are you out of your minds?” Something was clearly wrong with this man.

Fortunately, Mary Trump had a decent life. She was at boarding school when her father died and hadn’t seen him much in those years. She disregarded her grandfather, who didn’t want her going to college. She had a good career as a psychologist, distanced herself from her uncle, and fought with him over her grandfather’s will.

After reading this book, I noticed something about Trump that I find disturbing. America’s great millionaires all had interesting hobbies, like JP Morgan’s book collecting, and Nelson Rockefeller’s fascination with art, among others. Trump, however, does nothing with his leisure time besides play golf and watch TV. Then there’s philanthropy: all of the great millionaires – Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Pratt, Whitney, Guggenheim, Cooper, and Hewett – built colleges and museums. But what did Trump endow? Nothing!

When interviewed about this book, her aunt Elizabeth reminisced about what a bad girl Mary Trump was, showing up to her grandfather’s Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners in jeans and a sweater. Was Donald Trump’s niece, cut off from the family circle, the only one tough enough to say no? Was she the only one who had the guts to look her grandfather in the eye and say no to him? It reminds me of the story of the Finnish prime minister, who had lunch with Hitler, and knowing Hitler detested smoking, lit a cigarette in Hitler’s presence. It was an open disregard for a domineering bully, and in similar fashion, Mary Trump knew exactly what little, trivial things, insignificant as they may seem, would piss off a selfish man. I bet nobody forgave her.

Alabama v. King: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Criminal Trial That Launched the Civil Rights Movement

    In the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, a Black American defendant, obviously innocent, kills his own defense with five words: I felt sorry for her. That’s all it takes for him to make the all-White jury hate him, he just has to act superior to a White person and he’s crossing the line. All it takes is for him to behave as though he’s better off than a White woman, and he’s seen as “uppity,” and racist Whites need no greater excuse to convict him (or worse) than him being uppity. In the Deep South of old, a Black man could risk his life just by opening his mouth. But that’s where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. crossed the line, and once he crossed that line, the USA wasn’t going back.

    Fred Gray was one of the few Black lawyers in 1950’s Alabama and he was part of Dr. King’s defense. One thing I learned from this book, not mentioned in history class, is that the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-1956 was not the first of its kind. There was an earlier bus boycott in New Orleans, which resulted in changing of the stops along the route. Another boycott in Tuskegee resulted in a lawsuit: the attorney general sued to force Black Americans to buy from White-owned stores! The judge said no, Black citizens had the right to trade – or not – with whomever they wanted. In this case, Gray describes the judge as courageous, but that raises questions. Why would a judge be courageous for ruling with his conscience? Why would it be courageous for a judge to rule based on commerce clauses? The dangers of taking a Black man’s side are a major part of this story.

    It seems (at least according to this book) that Southern racists had a need for segregation, and a need to keep Black Americans as second-class citizens, and that need was power. Having someone beneath you in status can make you feel very powerful. Even the poorest White persons could feel good knowing that a Black family had to defer to them. A poor White girl, starving and clothes rags, could feel like a queen when a Black man (regardless of age) had to step aside for her and address her as “miss.”

    Calling Dr. King’s bus boycott “illegal” was really a way of saying, “How dare he speak!” In a way it was like Olver Twist asking for more slop: by voicing dissatisfaction, Oliver was denying the warden’s sense of benevolence. The author quotes White leaders who described the Black southern living standard as “equal to our own,” and given how Black school were crumbling, and few Black Americans could get loans from banks, such a view seems highly distorted. Was the Southern racist attitude a deliberate construct, or were Southern Whites deluding themselves? The authors show how the South was becoming increasingly isolated, thanks to the Jim Crow policies. For example, when insurance companies cancelled the policies for cars in the boycott carpool, Lloyd’s of London stepped in to insure the cars. These foreign banks were deliberately interfering with the Southern racist efforts, and it showed them that the world was offering no recognition of segregation.

   Some historians believe that the 1960’s, with all the anti-authority rhetoric and rebellion, began with the Civil Rights movement. Aside from industrial strikes, there had never been a mass of people disobeying authority, and certainly not to the extent that they’d put themselves in danger. But the trial of Dr. King, for what the city of Montgomery called an “illegal” boycott, had to have been a major catalyst. When Dr. King was not sent to prison, and released to continue his effort, it sent a message to the South that Jim Crow could be weakened.

Without Jim Crow, the South would have to reconsider the norms and mores.

Paul Joins the Scouts

    I don’t often see a graphic memoir about happy families. After reading the well-known selections -Maus, The Arab of the Future, Persepolis, and Stitches, to name a few – I came to the conclusion that lousy lives make for better storytelling. This is where Michel Rabagliati’s Canadian comics defy parameters: he writes and draws of a happy life, that’s both a pleasure and a tragedy to read. The story begins with a sneaker hanging from a wire, foreshadowing an abrupt and shocking end to a wonderful childhood.

    The story begins simple enough: Paul Riforiati is ten years old, like to eat Aero Bars, watches cartoons, draws comics, gets chased by a red-haired girl his age, and enjoys the child-friendly atmosphere of Montreal. He’s introduced to a Catholic scout troop (though it’s not clear if it’s part of the mainstream Boy Scout movement) and meets a whole new set of kids. And new adults. But is there something else going on here? Could the scout masters have a hidden motive for their involvement? The story is told against the backdrop of the FLQ and the October Crisis, and if you’re not familiar with Canadian history, you may need to do a quick web search.

    The character of Paul is a French-speaking Quebecois, though the family has absolutely no use for nationalism. They view the Front Liberte de Quebec as a nuisance, and the conservative Catholics probably see it as Communist. One of the scoutmasters is a beret-wearing leftist college student named Daniel Sabourin, who may or may not be involved with FLQ. It’s left to the reader to wonder, is the scout troop really a front for the nationalists? Is it some kind of recruiting effort? The scouts have to be Catholic, and despite one of the scoutmasters being a Priest, there doesn’t seem to be any religion involved. Is the requirement that they be Catholic really just a way of keeping Anglos or Jews out?

   The motives of the scoutmasters are another issue that’s left to the reader. While one of them is ordained, the scoutmaster named Ballou is revealed to be gay and living with a man. His lover boyfriend, disappointed in how much time Ballou spends on the scout troop, actually questions his motives, saying, “You must like seeing those boys in their little shorts!” Yet there’s no sign anywhere of inappropriate behavior among the adults in the equation. Then there’s Akela, working in a factory, and refusing to join the coworkers on their tours of the strip joints (hey, did I mention that Montreal was somehow the strip club capitol of North America?). Is Akela really gay and closeted? Ballou probably has a job where nobody will question is lifestyle, but Akela, if he is in fact gay, would probably have to keep it hidden. Is the scout troop a substitute for these men having no children of their own?

    In terms of family, Rabagliati portrays his mother as a sexy, vivacious woman, proud of her looks and enjoying her life as a stay-at-home parent. The only problem is her mother-in-law, who lives across the hall, and with whom she’s locked in a messy power struggle. Her obese bachelor brother-in-law lives with his mother and he’s another thorn in her side. The family are what we’d consider middle class: they have a spacious apartment, the kids have their own rooms, and they dress well. One of the recurring themes in the Paul Riforiati saga is how he always finds himself to be better-off than others. He wears Adidas sneakers (not exactly the priciest of shoes) but the other scout wears far cheaper ones.

   Rabagliati begins with that image of the shoe hanging on the wire, the result of a car crash that kills everyone. Except Paul. Staying home from the scout trip, thanks to a broken leg, saves him from the accident. Though the loss of his friends is never mentioned in later episodes of the book, I wonder if he develops survivor’s guilt? Could it explain his lack of motivation later on? Then there’s the stadium for the 1976 Olympics, which we see in the later episode Paul Up North. The ’76 Olympics will be another disappointment for the family.

   Perhaps this book is some kind of metaphor for disappointment? The kid goes from being a bit of a loner, to an avid Boy Scout, to losing his friends in the space of one day. The ending is shocking.

Stepping Stones by Lucy Knisley

 

Forgive me if I’ve written his before, but todays graphic memoirs all share a  character, namely the feeble mother. Let’s recap a little. In The Arab of the Future, the feeble mother allows herself to be dragged to the worst country in the world; in Be Prepared, the feeble mother is completely ignorant of her children’s feelings; in Cub, the idiot other thinks of her daughter as a puppet and an avatar. Now we have the memoir Stepping Stones, where the feeble mother allows her boyfriend to verbally abuse her daughter. Feeble moms make for a great story.

Lucy Knisley, the cartoonist who gave us the graphic memoirs Relish (brilliant), Age of License (self-obsessed story mediocre artwork), Displacement (better), Something New (don’t bother), and Kid Gloves (okay), is finally looking back on her life. Stepping Stones has good quality drawing, and she mines her life story to create a serious comic for young readers. It’s all about moving to the country, getting used to a new environment, dealing with new people, and having to share your new home with strangers. What I have trouble dealing with is the adult character’s behavior.

The protagonist is Jennifer McGinnis, born in NYC (though the neighborhood is not mentioned), who moves upstate with her mother. Now they live on a large property that her mother is turning into a farm, complete with chickens, a henhouse, and crops that they sell in the farmer’s market. However, the so-called farm sees more like a large hobby garden, because I don’t see how they could gain much in revenue from such a small farm. The chickens have an interesting role in the story: they’re cute pets, and they’re an unwanted chore, and they’re a source of conflict between Jen and her new stepsister.

Dealing with a new and unfamiliar adult in the house is one of the many unpleasant issues that Jen faces. Walter the stepfather is an obnoxious, high-handed loudmouth, legitimately annoying, and Jen believes (perhaps correctly) that he takes pleasure in putting her down. He repeatedly calls her Jenny, and not Jen, which she prefers. I have to wonder, what could an adult could gain by calling a child by her non-preferred name? Does it make him feel powerful? Is it a way to let off steam? He chews her out, browbeats her constantly, and all this goes on under her mother’s nose. When Jen runs off crying, her mother tries to comfort her by saying “well, he’s like that.”

In a story like this, I’m tempted to assume that Jen’s change of scenery will be a learning experience. I’d assume that the protagonist will conquer these nasty people, learn new skills, and go from being the victim to the victor. Nope, that doesn’t happen. In the first scene of the book, she explores the hayloft, finds barn kittens, brings them some food, and relaxes by lying in the hay and drawing the kittens. Everything is good…..until she hears her name called. It’s hard to enjoy learning, if hearing your name is a sign of trouble.

Peer relationships are explored well in Stepping Stones. While the stepfather is the primary antagonist, Jen’s stepsister Andrea is an antagonist and foil combined. When we think of the stepsister in children’s books, we tend to assume the villainous fairy tale character, or (thanks to Disney) the ugly jealous interloper. We get the opposite of that in Stepping Stones: the evil stepsister is neither ugly (she looks like a normal kid) nor jealous, and I say that because she considers everything Jen is or has to be inferior. She’s incredibly self-satisfied, and she looks at Jen as a poor and incompetent child who needs to be helped. Andrea is an obnoxious know-it-all, a myopic bulldozer, and her level of paternalism towards Jen is astounding. You know for sure that she isn’t jealous, because if she sees something she wants, she just goes ahead and takes it. On her first day at the farm, she immediately starts naming the chickens, despite Jen’s polite protest that she already gave them names. Andrea openly criticizes everything Jen does, and her father backs her up, always reminding Jen that she needs to let Andrea “teach” her. This is not a way to motivate a child. You really get the feeling of Jen’s powerlessness, and how everyone is ganging up on her.

A side plot to the story is the farmer’s market. Jen’s mother makes her work at their stall, despite the girl having a clear and present case of dyscalculia, and her inability to make change becomes a big conflict. All the while, I’m wondering about two things: first, why does she make her daughter run the till when she knows the kid can’t do the math, and second, why doesn’t this idiot give her daughter a calculator. When Jen goofs up at making the change, her mother says, “you told me your father was doing flash cards with you!” In this scene the feeble mother really rises to her level of incompetence.

I have to wonder if this book is suitable for young readers. There’s nothing wrong with the language, and the illustrations are great, plus we could always do with a book about kids dealing with divorce. But who wants a story about a kid being verbally abused? An English teacher could still use this book a s prompt on problem-solving, and the assignment could be on how Jen could respond to her stepfather’s remarks.

I give five stars for the artwork. They’re all done in earth tones, and you can almost smell the grass, the trees, and the mustiness of the ground. There aren’t any bright colors, and that’s perfect, because there’s nothing colorful about a helpless, powerless kid surrounded by people who gang up on her.

Not by the Sword, by Kathryn Watterson

  Larry Trapp, Grand Dragon of the Nebraska Ku Klux Klan makes an announcement: he’s going to blow up the Synagogue in Lincoln, massacre the entire Jewish population, and then do the same to the blacks (and if he’s smart, he’ll spare the Jewish doctors, black orderlies, and Vietnamese nurses.) The police do nothing. The citizens are apathetic. So what can the Synagogue Cantor do? Knowing that Trapp is blind and legless, he picks up the phone and says “need a ride?” I mean come on, what does Cantor Weisser have to lose? He figures he’s doomed anyway, because the same group of racists destroyed a Vietnamese community center, and the police weren’t much help with that one. But when Weisser finally meets (what he thinks is) this powerful, menacing monster of a Klansman, he’s in for a surprise. He know that Trapp is disabled and can’t see, but even worse, Trapp is not a hard-driven man with any resolve.  He’s just a lonely guy, hiding behind a large bear, dying of diabetes, and never recovered from an abusive childhood. They invite the guy over for dinner on Shabbat, and by Sunday he’s thrown his white hood in the trash.

    Back in the 1990’s, I watched documentaries about white supremacists, and they were all the same: disaffected young people, alienated from their parents, hopelessly drifting through life, and without adult guidance.  Then along comes a manipulative adult, flatters these kids with attention (or alcohol) and they’re now in his clutches. Trapp was an adult when he joined the Klan, but just like those poor kids, he fell into the web that his “benefactors” had spun. It was after Weisser treated him as an equal, and not a pawn, that Trapp would see that he was wrong (and had been wronged). It would not only be a time where he’d ask for forgiveness, but also find the strength to forgive his own father, who’d pretty much destroyed the family.

    Now let’s look at these two main characters; Larry Trapp is a working class Midwesterner, and Mordecai Weisser is a Jew from New York. You might think they have nothing in common, but they do. Both had troubled childhoods, both had lousy parents, and both did time in jail. Weisser had a non-typical childhood for a Jewish-American: raised in a broken home, in and out of youth reformatories, looking for acceptance with the wrong crowd. The difference is that Weisser discovered his Jewish roots and found a strong community to be part of. Trapp didn’t. So while Weisser found a happy career, Trapp drifted through life, escaping into the bottle. Weisser obviously senses what Trapp’s troubles really are. Perhaps his own rough childhood has gave him a kind of telepathy?

    Trapp was dead within a few months. In the years after this story took place, Weisser and his wife divorced, he took a post in New Zealand, returned to the USA and became the Rabbi of an old congregation in Flushing, Queens. The neighborhood had few Jews left when he arrived, not because of anti-Semitism, but because they simply got old. The area is now 90% Chinese and Korean, so the Synagogue is like a lone holdout. Things are not what they were in 1994, with fewer hate groups to join and former skinheads have left their past behind. Weisser’s congregation in Flushing had no conflict with the Asian community in any manner whatsoever. Why would they? The social dynamic is far different.  They’re like two ships passing in lanes half a mile apart, neither one’s interests conflicting with the other.

   I read a similar book, Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead by Frank Meink. The author was just like Larry Trapp; abused kid, horrible neighborhood, then the racists show up and give him something to belong to. He had no real beef with the blacks, and there were none where he lived. His problem was that he was a lost boy. Essentially, that’s what Trapp was, and the Weissers didn’t have to try that hard to bring him in from the cold. But Meink had to go to jail to see the error in his ways. All Weisser had to do to change Larry Trapp was to offer to meet him face to face.

   When my mother read this book, she wasn’t especially impressed. With a look of annoyance, she said “No wonder it got the Saint Christopher medal, this is the kind of book that Christians just love!” Now you must understand, my parents are part of a strict sect of Judaism, so there’s a lot they’ll expect of a book that has anything to do with Judaism. My mother may have thought that Cantor Weisser’s interest in Judaism was shallow: she expects a Jewish clergyman to be a bit more scholarly. But over the years, I’ve realized that it plays into a desire that people have, and that is to seek peace through mutual understanding and cooperation. Look at the current movement for Restorative Justice as an example, where people try to reduce crime by encouraging dialogue.  

    Back in 1999, a man named Buford Furrow shot and killed a bunch of people over their skin color. He was a failed engineer, and despite having no experience in military or law enforcement, was made a Lieutenant of security for the Aryan Nations. He was known to be proud of his rank, which outside of the racist gang meant nothing to anyone.  Fourteen years after shooting an immigrant mailman and several children, he admitted that he was wrong. It’s not unusual for young killers to say “we were bored” or for a terrorist to have been a beta male in life. That’s the essence here; bored, angry, hopeless, and wanting to feel stronger. It’s a bad combination. But thanks to some strong minded people, there is hope. Cantor Weisser believed in the Jewish ethic of forgiveness: first you learn why your actions were wrong, then you admit your wrongs, and finally, you consciously cease to transgress. By being the first to treat this Klansman as an equal, Weisser brought him to see the error in his ways and make amends for all his wrongs.

I wonder if lives would’ve been spared if Weisser had gotten to Buford Furrow.

Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing

    The big debate about today’s public housing is whether it’s a commodity or an entitlement, depending on whether the opinion is from the right or left wing of the debate. Th next issue, though not really a debate, is who’s responsible for the terrible condition of public housing. Municipal Dreams is all about Britain’s public housing (known as Council Flats or Council Estates) and whether it’s a model of progress or a model of what to avoid.

    John Boughton begins with the origins of British public housing and how it replaced the Dickens-era slums. Parliament passed a law in 1866 that allowed town councils to buy land and tear ir down for new housing (an early form of eminent domain) though there was no quality control. The author brings up a builder’s journal from 1869, which criticizes Liverpool’s St. Martin’s cottages for their terrible appearance. Though he doesn’t expressly mention it, finding any kind of financing for a building project would have been difficult in Victorian England; it seems unlikely that British banks were eager to lend money to builders, unlike the USA, where J.P. Morgan loved giving loans to big business. The next problem is that nobody wanted to go into property management. While the author cites some Victorian-era public housing that still stands, and built with good quality, they are few and far between. Where would a town council have gotten financing for a building project in the 1800’s? Did the council members want to get stuck being a landlord? Who would oversee collecting the rents and keeping track of repairs? It’s a problem that began the minute public housing began.

    Dullness and banality are another issue in the book, not as pressing as quality, but still a factor in the housing and its effect on the community. The author’s example is the Becontree Estate, where all the houses are identical, and that was a shock to the townspeople when it was constructed. They were used to the traditional asymmetrical British architecture, where each house was built according to the builder’s own plan. Then there’s the Honor Oak Estate, slightly less banal, and recently refurbished. I suspect that one of the issues here is the fact that the public housing was designed for multitudes, as opposed the one family. In earlier times, a wealthy man would hire a builder to design and build his house according to three things; the condition of his land, the needs of the homeowner, and how much money they could afford to spend. Any builder in this day and age will have to factor in the same three things, or it won’t work. But in the origins of public housing, the builders were constructing a whole block of houses at once, so there was no individuality to them. Then in contrast to what I mentioned before, the land wasn’t always the best available, so you had mold and damp. The residents had no say in the building process, and there wasn’t much oversight to the materials used.

    The next topic the author writes is how the public housing was badly needed in the first place. The old housing stock from earlier times was crumbling, and had terrible sanitation (and probably a firetrap too) so it made sense to get rid of it. Replacing the filthy housing could also prevent outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, dysentery, and others. After WWII, not only were the old houses crumbling, but a lot of them were bombed and burned. The city of Birmingham built the Castle Vale Estate, with low-rise blocks and a few tower blocks, and everything was great…until the shoddy construction began to fight back! First the pipes leaked, then the leaking pipes were not replaced, then the leaking pipes eroded the plaster, then the elevators broke down, windows got stuck, doors got stuck (or wouldn’t close at all) and doorknobs came loose. Then the stuck windows let cold air in, and the non-locking doors invited crime. It was the same problem that the Pruit-Igoe houses in St. Louis had. Public housing is clearly a problem for the same reasons, no matter where in the world you build it.

    Recently, I visited Liberty Plaza in Manhattan, and saw how it looked like a British council house. The building is a tower block, with a plaza in the center, some townhouse-style units, and a stairway entrance. There was no physical barrier to keep trespassers out of the plaza, but the stairway prevented impulsive entry. This is an example of designing a building for security, so that the residents will be safe without the building becoming a fortress. It was built with quality materials that lasted for years, and the property was maintained daily, with littler swept up and graffiti painted over. There was retail space on the ground level, generating revenue for upkeep.

   The author does the best research for this book. He covers housing estates all over Britain, and explores their political and economic origins, plus the type of construction used. After reading this book, the reader is left to question whether the problem was the land, and architecture, the lack of maintenance, the lack of funding for maintenance, or general neglect of the poor. He does not say whether the public housing estates effectively Gerrymandered the votes, nor does he say whether this was the design or a side effect. Maybe the reason includes all of the above?

How to Fight Anti-Semitism

   The author was inspired to write this book partly in response to the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting. It stung her for two reasons; it was the same place where she’d had her Bat Mitzva ceremony, and her previous congregation in Squirrel Hill burned down the previous year. She compares it to the attacks on Jews in France and blames that on the French government’s reaction. Either the French will deny that the Jews were the target, or they’ll claim that the Jewish community were partly responsible.

    Weiss goes into the history of antisemitism in the USA (or lack of it) which she attributes to the founding fathers’ dislike of old-world grievances. There wasn’t much in the way of Christian antisemitism in the USA in the early days, mainly because George Washington (and Ben Franklin, and John Hancock, and all the others present at the Declaration of Independence) rarely went to church, and they certainly weren’t going to take orders from the clergy. Though she doesn’t expressly say it, the businessmen who founded the USA were less interested in God and more interested in people who could pull their weight.

   Looking back on the documentary Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred, I can see how the anti-Jewish sentiment lingers everywhere. Take the stereotypes as the prime clue to the puzzle; the Jew as the money-loving businessman, or the Jew as the money-hating communist. The image of the Jew is protean; it can be whatever evil you don’t like. Weiss also goes into how this is about religion more than ethnicity or color. She points out that the Hasids in Crown Heights were targeted for their distinctive clothing and beards, while at the same time a Jewish college student got an “eviction notice” from an anti-Zionist student group. The Jewish students had nothing to do with Zionism on campus, so why should they have to answer for what Israel does? The Black youth who targeted Hasids in Crown Heights didn’t target the Jews who didn’t have beards or black hats because they were harder to spot. Then there’s the Israeli family who dealt with rocket attacks in Sderot, a swastika on their garage door in California, and the Poway Chabad shooting. Each time they were attacked, it was because of their religion.

   I’ve had personal experience with inappropriate remarks over me being a Jew, but most pf them were based on idiocy rather than ideology. First there was the idiot coworker (behind on his child support, averse to having to work, and often in trouble with the law) who said “you’re the biggest Jew I ever saw” despite the fact that he probably knew none. Then there was moron coworker #2, who said all Jews were 90lb wimps with no dicks (lucky for him he never had to fight me). Finally there was the 16 year old high schooler; a Chinese-American kid, on probation for a crime committed at Brooklyn Tech, who drew a swastika to see how I would react. I declined to tell his probation officer about the incident, because I knew we’d get no results. The judge would’ve been angry at the boy, but who takes a moron seriously? All of the people who insulted me because of my religion were morons; lazy, unmotivated, stupid, and likely to screw up no matter wherever they went.

   Ban the Zionists, and that would include 80% of all Jews. If you ban Cubans for being anti-Castro, then you would have no Cubans in Miami. As for anti-Jewish attacks, are they really about a beef with Jewish people, or just plain old crime? The author devotes a chapter to anti-Jewish sentiment in Muslim countries, going back to the days of the Jizya. The author finds it surprising that there can be Jew-haters in the Middle East, when there are few Jews left in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Yemen, and Syria. So what was the Muslim world’s beef with their Jewish neighbors? First there was the notion that refusal to convert to Islam was a slight to the prophet, then there was the Jealousy over western aid, then it was about Israel. Nowadays the Jews are being spat on by Muslims in Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Milan, and Malmo, despite the fact that no European Muslim is suffering at the hands of Jew. When President Trump announced his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, the city of Malmo was full of protest by Muslims. The famously rough Swedish city, home to scores of Muslim immigrants, is no stranger to trouble. But the protestors weren’t rallying against Trump, or the USA, or Israel; they were chanting “shoot the Jews” The mayor of Malmo didn’t help things by saying “we don’t accept Anti-Semitism and we don’t accept Zionism.” What does one have to do with the other? The tiny Jewish community in Sweden isn’t pushing Zionism, in fact there are probably fewer Swedish Jews pushing Zionism than Swedish gentiles pushing drugs.

   In the recent book Terror in France, written by French professor name Gilles Kepel, the problem of Muslim terrorism is blamed on the politicians; the right-wing use it to push tougher immigration standards, while the left-wing use it to accuse the authorities of racism. Weiss brings up the same argument in her book, and shows how the right and left groups in Europe’s legislatures use it to their own gains. In the end, however, it’s not the Jews who suffer, but the whole of Europe. The Jews will simply pack up and leave, taking their money, business, talents, and whatever contributions they make, leaving the rest of Europe to fend for itself. Meanwhile, racist politicians like Marine LePen have a bigger platform to bash immigration.

    Unfortunately, Weiss doesn’t give much of an idea of how to fight the problem of Anti-Semitism. From what I gather in her book, the problem is lax border control and weak law enforcement. I suspect that Britain and Europe have a separate code of conduct for different people, and it makes the authorities tolerate criminal behavior in the name of Islam. Donald Trump is also part of the problem, because his Anti-Muslim rhetoric puts the Jewish community in a tight spot. However, as long as the USA has only one set of laws, and the police enforce it, then you won’t have an entire neighborhood spitting on Jews in the street. In all of the recent attacks on Jews – the Poway shooting, Pittsburgh shooting, Monsey machete attack – the perpetrator was either a habitual offender, or a disaffected loner. The politics behind the attack? Chances are he uses the politics as an excuse, nothing more. In the Holocaust Museum shooting in 2000 (does anyone remember that one?) the killer was an elderly White supremacist, who according to his son, had pretty much ruined the family with his activities.

    Look at how Zionism exists in the USA versus Europe. We’ve had Rabbis attacked in Crown Heights, but the attackers are always criminals and they’re usually brought to justice. Then you have the Israel Parade in NYC, every year, and there’s rarely any trouble. Lots of non-Jews march in the parade, and no Muslim group ever attacked the marchers. Now compare it to the UK and France, where Muslim fanatics are known to attack people. The attacks in UK and France are often ideological, and the police are sometimes unsure of what to do. They seem to wonder if the attack is excusable based on the motivation, rather than relying on codified law. In New York City’s Israel Parade, you can wave the Israeli flag without fear, and we rarely see Palestinian rights groups protesting at the event. In fact the only time I ever saw violence at the Israel parade was a Jewish militant group harassing the Neturei Karta sect of Hasidism. Jewish kids run around the city’s parks every weekend without getting rocks thrown at their heads, and Muslim girls are not told to take off their headscarves at school.

Maybe the problem is not Anti-Semitism, but the condition of Europe?

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.

Apple Tree: Writers on Their Parents

    I remember reading the essay On Seeing England for the First Time by Jamaica Kincaid, and that essay touches on all that she inherited (or didn’t) from her parents. One of the things they try to give her is their love of England, a place that (a) they never visited, (b) hadn’t given them anything, and (c) she rejects the first time she sees it. After reading Kincaid’s ode (or if you prefer, a fast eulogy) to England, I read Amy Tan’s essay Mother Tongue, which is also about the author’s parents. In Mother Tongue, Tan’s mother is taken for a fool when she doesn’t use English, when in fact she is quite shrewd. She uses the façade to trick snotty Anglo-Saxons into dropping their guard. In every memoir I’ve read, the author’s parents are a strong influence (for better or for worse) and in this collection, 25 authors recount their experiences with their parents. Yet in each essay, the influence can be one of acceptance or rejection.

    Not all of the essays in this book give much in the way of literary value, but the one by Angelique Stevens really got my attention. Her family moved constantly (like Jeanette Walls in The Glass Castle) and her mother an avid reader, yet she spent most of her daughter’s life in the looney bin (like Allen Ginsberg’s mother) in Rochester, New York. Now for those of you unfamiliar with Rochester, it’s a run-down and crime-ridden city in Upstate New York, right on Lake Erie, a prominent member of America’s Rust Belt. Like Swansea was to Dylan Thomas, Rochester is “the graveyard of ambition” on most levels. The author’s family lies in that graveyard, as her father was a lifelong alcoholic, and her sister became a prostitute to pay for a crack habit, but at least the author went to college at age 27. Her adult life consists of dealing with her parents’ breakdowns, and when they die, it’s of no issue to her; she treats her father’s burial as though she were giving away an old sofa. When her mother dies, she barely mourns, yet she is surprised by the great books found in the apartment – Hemmingway, Twain, Baldwin – that her mother kept on the shelf all her life. The first irony is that these cheap little books are desired by ragpickers more than clothes or furniture. The second irony is that all those writers came from dysfunctional families. Just like hers.

    Some of the authors, like Avi Steinberg, question their family traditions. Steinberg’s family moved around a lot (am I seeing a pattern here?) including a stay in Israel, where his mother was a zookeeper. She was also a bit of an underachiever, never staying in any place long enough to make a career for herself. Now here is where the author is unsure: was she a restless adventurer, or was she trying out every kind of job to find one that suited her? Then he goes into how Judaism is patriarchal, and the idols that the Rabbis despised were often female (okay, most Semitic deities are female) and it was the men who made the decisions. He uses, as an example, Rachel refusing to get off her seat because she was menstruating (another irony, because in biblical times, menstruation was the only excuse a woman had to disobey her husband). The author’s mother came from an abusive home, so the constant moves may have been a way to avoid structure and control. Both Stevens and Steinberg are the product of crazy intellectuals.

    I’m not so sure if it’s worth having Kyoko Mori’s essay in this collection, as she has written two books on the same story already. The first was her autobiography, published in the 1990’s, and then a teen novel, which was basically a fictionalization of the autobiography. She doesn’t offer much in the way of new insights into her abusive childhood, which I will not spend time going into. Most of the authors included in this book had a lousy experience while growing up, but so did a lot of other great memoirists. Tobias Wolfe wrote about his horrible childhood, and it became the 1988 memoir This Boy’s Life, now considered a classic. Jeanette Walls recounts her crazy childhood in The Glass Castle, and the recent memoir titled Educated, by Tara Westover, is all about growing up in a survivalist family in the mountains. Andre Dubus III (son of the great Andre Dubus II, and neither are featured in Apple Tree) wrote in his memoir about how his college professor father left the kids to suffer in a violent town. The memoir, titled Townie, is full of fights, parental neglect, and deprivation. Same thing with Riad Sattouf’s The Arab of the Future. Same thing with David Smalls’ Stitches.

   In the grand scheme of memoir, I assume that a lousy childhood makes for great writing. But are there no writers out there with great childhoods? Is there no great memoirist whose life wasn’t stinky? Lucy Knisley’s Relish (okay, it's a comic, but it's still about her life) is a great celebration of food and eating. She learned good things from her parents, and while her childhood had ups and downs, the contrast between the enjoyable and the lousy were part of the learning. The contrast between good and bad creates a greater dynamic, and contrasts and conflict are a major part of literature. The great memoirs, like This Boy’s Life, are not just about having a lousy life, but surviving one.

   Stories that are only about bad things are not interesting, nor can we learn from them. You can’t know your life is bad unless you see a good one too.

Be Prepared by Vera Brosgol

    Vera, I feel your pain. I can relate to your experience at camp. It’s a time-tested American tradition, going to sleepaway camp for the summer and having a great time or a terrible time. You’re stuck out in the countryside with people you hardly know and you’re with them 24-7. You can’t go home at the end of the day, you can’t ask your parents for advice, and you have no privacy.

   Be Prepared is a graphic novel (though not really a novel because it’s not fiction) based on the author’s experience in a Russian camp in Connecticut. As an immigrant kid growing up in Albany, she doesn’t fit in with the rich kids, nor any other group for that matter. One of the saddest scenes in this book is her “failed sleepover” (also a time-tested American tradition) and the huge disappointment it brings. The scene sets the tone for the rest of the book, where the underprivileged kid becomes a social outcast. It’s a theme throughout the book; she always ends up being the kid who doesn’t get. As for the camp, I assumed it would be one of those young Pioneer camps they had in the USSR, but no, it’s no that kind of place. While it is Russian in terms of language, it’s run by the church, and not designed to foster economic and social equality.

    Brosgol captures the essence of childhood perfectly. Her eyes are almost as big as her face, enlarged by her oversized glasses, which seem to form a barrier against the world. Those huge eyes show all her hope, fear, anxiety, and hopelessness. In the sleepover scene, she goes from wide-eyed optimism to disappointment to being completely resigned. The artwork is perfect, with olive greens that give you the essence of nature. She also captures facial expressions and body language perfectly, making her mother look both resolute and feeble at the same time. When it comes to the portrayal of the kids, the author uses head size, posture, and facial expressions to show the age difference. Vera is only ten years old in the book, but she’s out in the bunk with fourteen-year-old girls, and as you guess, she feels outnumbered and invisible.

    Like I mentioned earlier, going to camp can be a source of happiness or pain. For Vera, she’s a kid from a less well-off family, whose mother is faced with two difficulties; first is her absent husband, and second are the children who want what they haven’t got. I can really relate to this, because I grew up around kids whose families were on a limited budget, and they felt guilty for asking for things that other kids had. At the same time, the parents had no idea that their kids were outcasts, and were trying desperately to fit in. You’re never sure if you should feel sympathy for the parents, or be annoyed because they’re feeble.

    I will recommend this book to kids over ten years old. It’s not hard to read, there are plenty of illustrations, and it has a story that kids can relate to.