Americans and the European Way
by Randy Shaw‚
Jan. 28‚ 2010
Michael Moore’s Sicko shows the director in France talking to American expats about the French health care system. They describe the great benefits that French residents take for granted, expressing dismay that no such benefits are legally mandated in the United States. Moore then asks why Americans so dislike the French, and posits it may be out of envy for a state that provides a superior quality of life for the average person.
Steven Hill’s Europe’s Promise expands Moore’s analysis to show how the social and economic policies of the “European Way” are superior to the United States in virtually every area. This includes health care, democracy, worker rights, energy efficiency, education and, most compellingly, the social safety net of child care, mandatory vacations, and parental and sick leave. Hill has essentially written a “Case Closed” for European capitalism’s superior ability to distribute benefits to a broader stretch of the population. Yet Americans may not be interested in this message.
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Paris Like You’ve Never Seen it Before
by Randy Shaw‚
Jan. 14‚ 2010
In 1907, France alone produced 300 million postcards, and over seven billion were sold worldwide. Germany was producing a billion a year, England over 600 million, and the United States nearly 800 million. Yet despite this passionate devotion to the mailing and collecting of postcards, their remarkable insight into both the present and past has only recently gained wider appreciation. An exhibit of Walker Evans’s historic postcard collection was a big hit at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum in 2009, and my March 2009 review of Glenn Koch’s wonderful San Francisco Golden Age of Postcards got a tremendous response. Now Leonard Pitt, author of the classic, Walks Through Lost Paris, has produced a beautiful book appropriately titled, Paris Postcards: The Golden Age. Pitt combines the beautiful artwork of Paris postcard scenes from the pre-1920’s era with the text written on the cards, enabling him to really bring Parisian history to life. Pitt has produced an essential book for those who have already seen Paris’ major tourist sites, and are now looking for a guide to its historic small streets, cafes, and buildings.
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Local Activists Document Movement to Repeal Prop 8
by Paul Hogarth‚
Jan. 07‚ 2010
I’ve attended my share of marriage equality rallies and protests in the past year, after the passage of Proposition 8 galvanized a new generation of activists. And at almost every event, I have run into Geoff King snapping black-and-white pictures with his camera. Now, Geoff has teamed up with activist Sunny Angulo to publish Such a Bittersweet Day – a handsome coffee table book that chronicles the local gay marriage fight since November 2008. Self-published through blurb.com, Geoff’s photos capture the raw passion that we’ve seen at these events – while Sunny conducted 16 oral histories of activists and gay couples who have played a vital role in the movement. City Attorney Dennis Herrera – who led the successful and unsuccessful efforts at the state Supreme Court on this issue – wrote the preface that provides historical context. All of the book’s proceeds go to organizations fighting for civil rights and healthy communities, starting with the Transgender Law Center and Health Legal Services.
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The Creative Brilliance of the Latino / New York City Connection
by Randy Shaw‚
Dec. 17‚ 2009
I have reviewed many fine books in 2009, and if I had to select a single book that interested readers must buy rather than get from a library or borrow from a friend it is the newly released, Nexus New York: Latin American Artists in the Modern Metropolis. Edited by Deborah Cullen, director of curatorial programs at New York City’s El Museo del Barrio, this book accompanied the exhibit of the same name that marked the museum’s reopening this fall after a major renovation. I saw the exhibit and found it to be artistically, culturally and politically powerful.
The book is a monumental achievement in its own right. It shows how the cross-fertilization of Latin-American and New York City artists shaped the home terrains of both, particularly impacting the era’s cultural politics. While it includes well known artists like Alice Neel and Diego Rivera, it also exposes the historic importance of figures like Joaquin Torres-Garcia and Miguel Covarrubias, the latter of whom came to shape the imagery of Harlem. From the only photos of Rivera’s destroyed Rockefeller Center mural to photos of David Alfaro Siqueiros teaching students in his Experimental Workshop, this book offers an impressive range of rare treasures.
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ACORN and the Power of Community Organizing
by Randy Shaw‚
Dec. 10‚ 2009
After Barack Obama stated during his primary campaign that he had once been a community organizer, it soon became clear that many Americans had no idea what this job entails. Sarah Palin ridiculed the community organizer’s job as lacking any responsibilities, and the Republican Party seemed to equate the organizing of low-income people to improve their lives as a Marxist-Leninist approach. Ironically, while the media failed to clearly explain community organizing last fall, former Tenderloin organizer and now Rutgers Professor Heidi Swarts released a book that detailed how organizers for both secular and faith-based organizations operate, and what they accomplish. Swarts’s Organizing Urban America was overlooked then, and remained ignored while the media subjected ACORN to enough unfair attacks to put the group’s future in jeopardy. Swarts provides clear evidence of ACORN organizers’ extraordinary commitment toward improving the lives of low-income Americans, and shows how they and faith-based organizers achieve progressive change.
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A Cultural History of the New York City Subway
by Randy Shaw‚
Nov. 24‚ 2009
During the recent Bay Bridge closure, there was much talk about how San Francisco Bay Area residents needed to become less car-dependent. Overlooked was the fact that the region’s many transportation systems collectively provide neither the 24-hour coverage nor geographic breadth to enable people to give up cars. In other words, the Bay Area’s public transit system is not in the same league as New York City’s legendary subway system, whose cultural and artistic significance is the subject of Tracy Fitzpatrick’s recent book, Art and the Subway: New York Underground. Fitzpatrick traces the subway from its opening in 1904 to the present, revealing how artists, writers, photographers and other cultural workers took advantage of the subway’s public and democratic milieu to forge their visions of society. She uncovers many surprising facts, such as the long history of subway graffiti, the use of guards to cram people into packed trains, and the ways in which artists captured the racial contradictions among a subway ridership that confounded traditional assumptions about the Melting Pot.
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“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!
February 9, 2010
