The Politics of Homelessness and the “Quality” of Urban Life
by Randy Shaw‚
May. 01‚ 2008
Despite nearly three decades of widespread visible homelessness in America, the traditional media--as San Francisco Chronicle readers well know--remains a fount of misinformation in assessing causes and solutions. This makes the release of Alex Vitale’s City of Disorder particularly timely. Vitale worked for the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness in the early 1990’s, and is now a Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College. His book is the most balanced analysis yet produced of the origins, and political impacts, of the backlash against public camping, sidewalk drinking, panhandling, “squeegee men,” illegal peddling and other “quality of life” issues. Although Vitale focuses on New York City, his analysis also helps explain San Francisco politics. While he agrees that homelessness is a product of decades of inadequate federal spending on low-cost housing, he make a convincing case that “urban liberalism”--embodied in policies adopted by such liberal mayors like David Dinkins and Willie Brown--has contributed to rising homelessnes and its link to public disorder.
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Backlash: The Undeserved War Against Susan Faludi
by Randy Shaw‚
Apr. 10‚ 2008
“This, sadly, is the sort of tendentious, self-important, sloppily reasoned book that gives feminism a bad name.” --- Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, Oct. 23, 2007
Susan Faludi is among the nation’s pre-eminent nonfiction writers. Her two prior books, the landmark Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women and the less successful but also provocative Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, stimulated wide-ranging public debate. But Faludi’s most recent book, Terror Dreams: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9/11 America, received far less attention. While most reviews were favorable, perhaps the most prominent was New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani’s unusually harsh critique. I think the reason Terror Dreams did not enter the public debate, and that Faludi’s journalistic credibility has been attacked, is that she effectively challenged the fundamental integrity of the United States media machine. Terror Dreams uses the media’s preference for fantasy over fact in its 9/11 coverage to demonstrate how “facts” are fabricated and widely spread regarding a broad range of issues to serve certain ideological agendas. Faludi hit too close to home in Terror Dreams, and the media industry responded by ignoring her message and demeaning her journalism skills---but this is a book that every progressive and media critic should read.
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Baxter’s Literary Puzzle
by Dana Crowell‚
Mar. 27‚ 2008
Charles Baxter’s The Soul Thief is not a typical novel. It is not formulaic. It is not plot-heavy. And, its characters are not predictable. Rather, The Soul Thief is Charles Baxter’s literary experiment to merge fiction and the real, a literary game for the literary-minded. Baxter’s novel grabs you on the first page and doesn’t let go.
The novel is set in the early 1970’s, “days of ecstatic bitterness and joyfully articulated rage,” and then jumps several decades into the present. It tells the story of Nathaniel Mason, a graduate student, and his relationship to a small circle of friends and lovers in Buffalo, New York.
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Latinos Still Struggle to Overcome Baseball’s Racial Biases
by Randy Shaw‚
Mar. 13‚ 2008
San Francisco Bay Area baseball fans have little to look forward to this season, which makes this the perfect time to relive past successes. Adrian Burgos Jr.’s Playing America’s Game fills this need, as it features a great cover photo of Giants legend Juan Marichal and explains how the Giants scouting system once led the league in finding quality Latino players. But Burgos has done much more than remind us of the rich history of such Latino Giant stalwarts as Marichal, Orlando Cepeda and the Alou brothers. He has written the best book yet on the history of Latinos in American baseball, particularly focusing on how they were impacted by baseball’s color line. Burgos shows that the disparate treatment of dark-skinned Latino players did not end when Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers in 1947, but continues to this day; Bay Area sports fans saw this firsthand when KNBR sports talk show host Larry Krueger made racist comments against the Giants Latino players and manager Felipe Alou in 2005. Burgos provides a wealth of critical insights about the social context by which native Spanish-speaking young men play baseball in the United States, and all serious baseball fans should read this book.
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Talkin’ About My Revolutions
by Dana Crowell‚
Feb. 28‚ 2008
The front cover of Hari Kunzru’s novel, My Revolutions, features a bold, upraised fist suggesting that inside the book’s iconic cover is a story about resistance, confrontation, rebellion. Having enjoyed other novels set during the Sixties, I eagerly opened My Revolutions only to be greeted by a short poem by the reflective, mystical, Sufi poet Rumi. I did a double take. What did Rumi, a poet who dwelt on the mysteries of the inner life, on love, and spirituality, have to do with a novel whose cover graphically suggests worldly action, external politics, and, most likely, violent revolution?
Reading Rumi’s short poem, “I used to have fiery intensity, and a flowing sweetness … Was I dreaming then? Am I awake now?” didn’t answer my question, but it deepened my curiosity. I was so intrigued that I read My Revolutions in three days, reveling in Kunzru’s protagonist’s fierce intensity, the “sweetness” of his idealism, while finding new wisdom in his philosophical insights, honest perceptions, and bittersweet analysis of revolutionaries in the underground and of the events that caused the breakdown of his much loved revolutionary world.
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Bock’s Beautiful Children Lives Up to the Hype
by Randy Shaw‚
Jan. 31‚ 2008
When a first novelist gets a pre-publication feature in the New York Times Sunday magazine, and blurbs from such prominent writers as A.M. Homes, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Walter Kirn, the author’s connections, rather than talent, first springs to mind. But Charles Bock’s first novel lives up to the pre-publication hype. After laboring for eleven years, Bock has produced a work that is deserving of all of the lavish praise it is likely to receive. In my estimation, no novel has so ambitiously sought to address the state of the family, the crises of adolescence, male-female relations, and the hidden social subtext of urban America since Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections -- and Bock’s book is grittier, more intense and ultimately more insightful than that 2001 best-seller.
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Dominicans in NYC Challenge Racial/Ethnic Borders
by Randy Shaw‚
Jan. 17‚ 2008
When progressives use such phrases as “communities of color” or “people of color,” it assumes unity among those who fit these categories. But at Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof describes in A Tale of Two Cities, Dominicans do not readily identify with others of a similar skin color, and do not easily fit into “color-based” categories. In fact, amidst the cauldron of New York City’s racial politics, Dominicans in the early 1970’s were first identified as “Spanish” or “Hispanic,” and then as “black,” despite their reluctance to identify with the city’s African-American community. But Dominicans came to New York City with their own sense of national identity. They did not want to be lumped with Puerto Ricans, Haitans or other groups often linked as “communities of color.” Dominican immigrants were faced with the question “What are you” in a city whose politics and social services broke down on racial and ethnic lines. The ethnic/racial aspect of Dominican lives is just one of the many thought-provoking features of what is likely the most comprehensive book available on the lives of Dominicans in New York City and Santa Domingo.
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What Democrats Need is a Little Backbone
by Paul Hogarth‚
Dec. 19‚ 2007
With Congress having failed to end the Iraq War, and the Senate debating a FISA bill to expand the President’s powers, it’s easy to conclude that the Democrats simply don’t care much about a progressive future. Glenn Hurowitz, who runs the Democratic Courage PAC, offers a different take in his new book, Fear and Courage in the Democratic Party. What Democrats need, he says, is a little courage. The Politics of Fear has cowed party leaders into believing that we are a conservative country – and that standing up for progressive values is a risky endeavor that could backfire. “It’s not that they’re intrinsically bad or cowardly,” he writes. “It’s that they remain slaves to a deeply flawed political strategy that says courage would ruin their political chance of success.” With five case studies, Hurowitz persuasively argues that standing up for what you believe in is not just the right thing to do – but also a winning politics. It’s a valuable lesson that Democrats should heed, as the first presidential primaries begin early next month.
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Jesse Unruh: California’s Forgotten Powerhouse
by Randy Shaw‚
Nov. 15‚ 2007
In the standard narrative of California history, the years 1958-66 saw Governor Pat Brown build much of California’s modern infrastructure. Brown’s legacy includes schools, colleges, freeways, and health systems; it is often said that this was the last period when Californians willingly accepted tax increases to expand government. But Pat Brown did not build modern California alone, and Bill Boyarsky makes a strong case that then-Assembly Speaker Jess Unruh also deserves major credit. Have Unruh’s contributions been unfairly overlooked? And how much of our understanding of California in the 1960’s is accurate, beginning with the oft-repeated and inaccurate blaming of Ronald Reagan for allegedly closing down the state mental hospitals? Boyarsky provides some of these answers in a highly readable, but often frustrating book on the man who described money as the “mother’s milk” of politics.
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Straight Talk on Mexican-American Identity
by Randy Shaw‚
Oct. 25‚ 2007
The subtitle of Gregory Rodriquez’s new book---Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America---reflects both the work’s strengths and weaknesses. As an analysis of the history of Mexican immigration to the United States from the 19th Century through the 1990’s, the book may be unsurpassed in its clarity and insights. But as an account of the future of racial identity in the United States, the work falls short by curiously ignoring the dramatic developments around Mexican-American identity that have occurred since 2000. The rise of the immigrants’ rights movement, and the resulting backlash, are not discussed in the book. These developments impact Rodriguez’s claim that Latinos are more impacted by class than racial concerns, and that the immigration issue is “losing its ethnic overtones.” But Rodriquez’s assertion that Latinos are not a monolith, and that Mexican-Americans are redefining racial identity in the United States while favoring assimilation far more than their advocates and opponents suggest, are but a few of the critical points that make Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans and Vagabonds a thought-provoking read.
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May. 06, 2008 -- Chronicle Publishes “Yes on 98” Cartoon May. 06, 2008 -- Turk and Hyde Lot Gets Cited!! May. 06, 2008 -- Prop 98 Boxes Us In May. 06, 2008 -- Germs 'R Us May. 06, 2008 -- Growth in SOMA; The Race Factor; Joe Nation ... May. 05, 2008 -- Lennar’s Prop G: A Vision or a Mirage? May. 05, 2008 -- Chronicle Cheerleads Mass Luxury High-Rise Boom May. 05, 2008 -- May Day, City of Oakland – 2008 May. 05, 2008 -- Racial Realities in the United States May. 05, 2008 -- Leno-Migden; The Truth About Ohio ... May. 02, 2008 -- Bay Guardian Backs Leno, Landlords Move to Joe Nation
May 9, 2008
