“People Power” in San Francisco’s Mission District
by Randy Shaw‚
Nov. 12‚ 2009
When I moved to San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood in 1979, its predominately Latino residents appeared largely unorganized, if not disenfranchised. I asked a longtime Latino activist if my sense was correct, and he replied, “We haven’t had a real grassroots peoples organizations since the MCO (i.e. Mission Community Organization).” This was the first I’d heard of the MCO, and would often hear the activist’s comments echoed by others. Now, Mike Miller, who was staff director of MCO during its 1969-71 heyday, has written A Community Organizer’s Tale, a book that chronicles MCO’s success, and its all too soon demise. Miller raises important questions about the impact of nonprofits on community advocacy, the role of public money in stifling dissent, and the challenge of maintaining a broad-based “peoples” organization when the “people” it seeks to represent have profoundly conflicting interests.
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Book Exposes Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death
by Randy Shaw‚
Nov. 05‚ 2009
When we think of the most dangerous jobs for young men, professional wrestler does not come to mind. Since wrestling matches are staged, and there is a history of stars like Freddie Blassie and Lou Thesz performing into their 60s, the assumption is that while wrestlers break bones and incur great pain, that the job itself is not life-threatening.
But as Irv Muchnick shows in his new book, Chris & Nancy: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide & Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death, successful careers in wrestling today often require the ingestion of a dangerous, and often fatal, level of steroids that would never be tolerated in a normal business. Wrestling impresario Vince McMahon, however, has built perhaps the nation’s only billion-dollar entertainment industry that is unregulated, which means that there is no public entity to prevent wrestlers from taking drugs that lead to their own deaths and even the lives of others. 21 wrestlers died before the age of fifty in 2007 alone, and Muchnick’s book is a powerful call for action.
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Starbucks and the Progressive Agenda
by Randy Shaw‚
Oct. 20‚ 2009
The words “Starbucks” and “progressive” rarely appear together. For most of the political left, the Starbucks Coffee Company is a villain that drives independent cafes out of business, mistreats workers, and profits from hijacking progressive values and transforming them into corporate profits. Yet Starbucks has long offered generous health benefits to domestic partners, pays wages equal if not often greater than independent cafes, has dramatically boosted incomes for organic coffee farmers abroad, and provides ample career opportunities for people of color. For many neighborhoods, Starbucks is also the only option for quality coffee. Longtime progressive activist Kim Fellner decided to assess Starbuck’s mixed record in her extremely thought-provoking book, Wrestling with Starbucks. Much of what Fellner uncovers will surprise readers, with her most provocative questions going beyond Starbucks to address some of the Left’s inconsistent attitudes toward large corporations.
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Local “Bright Light” Dazzles with The Tricking of Freya
by Celia DuBose‚
Oct. 08‚ 2009
This was her first novel, and knowing how little publicity she would get from her publisher and how undone I had been by the sheer beauty of the book’s jacket and website, I promised to write this review. My new friend Christina Sunley was proving to be a sweet and good person (spending her days as a full-time nonprofit fundraiser). What were the chances that she could also be as good a novelist as I would need her to be to avoid pretzel syndrome, in which I become a contortionist in order to transform my true opinion into something approaching praise? Dread made the blank space between “Chapter 1” and its first line seem vast and mocking. I was breathing heavily. Everything depended on these first words!
Oh, thank God. The six words tossed me into a crisp landscape where something important was broken. Hoping for a healing, I finished the first chapter just in time to make it over to Diesel Books in Oakland for Christina’s first reading. I looked her in the eyes and smiled without any pretzel fears.
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Reclaiming the Bronx
by Randy Shaw‚
Oct. 01‚ 2009
Since World War II, urban America has been shaped by two thirty- year trends. The years 1945-75 saw the middle-class relocate to the suburbs, and the decline of the nation’s once thriving urban residential neighborhoods and business districts. From 1975-2005, affluent residents returned to cities, spawning a wave of urban gentrification that has steadily continued, stalled only by the 1987 S&L crash, the late 1990’s dot com bust, and the current nationwide mortgage crisis. The Bronx section of New York City never recovered from the post-war middle-class exodus, missing the massive gentrification that has overtaken neighboring Manhattan during the same period. Unfortunately, instead of producing a solid working or middle-class community, the Bronx was long beset by arson, crime and disinvestment; it is currently the nation’s poorest urban county. Constance Rosenblum uses the 100th anniversary of the Champs Elysees of the Bronx, the Grand Concourse, to explain what has happened to this once beloved neighborhood. While Boulevard of Dreams is a bit overly skewed toward nostalgic recollections, the book provides helpful insight into how a once fabled neighborhood that was the launching point for generations of Jewish immigrants fell into disrepair, and how the past decade has finally seen evidence of revival.
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Remembering Ramparts, Icon of the New Left
by Randy Shaw‚
Sep. 10‚ 2009
What do Robert Scheer, David Horowitz, Adam Hochschild, and Warren Hinckle have in common? All got their journalistic careers put on the map while writing for Ramparts, the legendary periodical that began in San Francisco in 1966 and lasted until 1975. Many younger activists are not aware of Ramparts’ legacy, which is why Peter Richardson’s new book, A Bomb in Every Issue, fills such an important gap in our understanding of the rise of both the New Left and investigative journalism. Begun as a journal for Catholic thought, Ramparts was soon transformed by Hinckle and Scheer into the nation’s preeminent media critic of the Vietnam War, U.S. foreign policy, and of the national security Establishment. Unlike the rest of the alternative press, Ramparts’ artwork and design matched the production quality of the mainstream media, which led Ramparts’ stories to be picked up by the New York Times and other outlets while similar information in The Nation was ignored. While trumpeting its legacy, Richardson does not shy away from the publication’s excesses; his book is thus an extremely honest account of a period whose activists and media have too often been romanticized.
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Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading
by Matt Zakosek‚
Sep. 03‚ 2009
A blog-turned-book skims the history of young-adult literature.
These days, young-adult literature — or “YA,” as librarians and marketers like to call it — has reached a level of respectability earlier generations could only dream of. Yann Martel’s Life of Pi is a staple of both adult and teen reading lists. Sherman Alexie won the National Book Award for The Absolutely True Adventures of a Part-Time Indian — also his first foray into YA. Even a Pulitzer Prize-winner like Joyce Carol Oates isn’t afraid to churn out a Sexy or Freaky Green Eyes every now and then.
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Book Review: Nowtopia by Chris Carlsson
by Robert Ovetz‚
Aug. 06‚ 2009
“We see people responding to the overwork and emptiness of a bifuricated life that is imposed in the precarious marketplace. They seek emancipation from being merely workers.”
This is an attempt to articulate a new analysis and understanding of the strategy of self-organization emerging among the working class. New emerging forms of resistance to capitalism lies, Chris Carlsson asserts, in how people are attempting to transcend capitalism in the present by evading, reappropriating or subordinating work to more pleasurable community oriented projects. Such projects create new often short lived spaces that are outside or antagonistic to the objectives of control and profits. Nowtopia is packed with thoroughly documented examples of cooperative bike kitchens, urban gardening movements, biofuel co-ops, and the free software from someone intimately knowledgeable about each of these movements. The fundamental commonality among these nowtopias is their insistence on Do-It-Yourself (DIY) tinkering and inventing “to produce a different way of life.”
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Minty Lewis’ Creative Brilliance
by Randy Shaw‚
Jul. 30‚ 2009
Midway through Minty Lewis’ newly released PS Comics, I got to thinking about Charles M. Schultz, the creator of Peanuts. Had Schultz introduced stories of Snoopy and Charlie Brown in the current era, his most productive years would have coincided with declining newspaper circulation and shrunken comic strips. Only graphic novel insiders would know the entire comic world he created. It may sound presumptuousness to link Minty Lewis and Charles Schultz, but like the Peanuts creator she has invented an entirely new world whose characters reveal deep insights about life. In Lewis’ case, her main characters are fruit, though dogs and salt and pepper-shakers also have their say. Lewis’ apple, pear, mango, lemon and others work in offices and have their own distinct personalities; their dialogue is both more realistic and more insightful than anything found in today’s situation comedies or the routinely sexist romantic comedies that fill our movie screens.
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The Truth About Satchel Paige
by Randy Shaw‚
Jul. 16‚ 2009
November 20, 2009
