book reviews last quarter 2008

I seem to be at a blank with trying to write blog entries so I decided to post my book reviews for this quarter early, though I will probably end up reading quite a few additional books in this last week of December as I will be on vacation. I'm excited about having some time to read since I have some really fascinating books lined up. A semester of assigned reading has awakened a desire for further exploration of different topics. I’m currently reading Engaging the Powers by Walter Wink as I have been reflecting on individual responsibility in systems of oppression. The book is so far absolutely fascinating….


I seem to be similarly stalled with my more tangible crafting pursuits. Here's a photo of a pair of baby socks I've knit up recently for an undisclosed recipient. I have plenty of "stash" yarn still sitting around, but nothing seems to be inspiring me to knit...




In any case, here are the reviews. I use the lovely non-pretentious rating scale from Goodreads
*didn’t like it
**it was ok
***liked it
**** really liked it
***** it was amazing

Fiction

*** The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz) ~ Having studied minority and postcolonial literature in college, I’ve been wary of reading “minority fiction” since much of it follows a similar narrative format. However, after attending a very interesting reading by the author, I decided to read the book. Using references to popular American science fiction and fantasy and to Dominican culture, the book narrates the life of Oscar Wao, a nerdy boy who cannot seem to get a girlfriend. The book also traces the history of his mother and his mother’s family during the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. The ending was a slight letdown but by no means ruined the book. Diaz is a phenomenal writer—his style is engaging and funny and this novel is a fresh take on the traditional immigrant narrative. It is not obsessed with identity, but rather concerned with presenting a story and a history for its characters and the Dominican Republic.

*** Migritude (Shailja Patel) ~ This continues my respect for relatively unknown authors that we never see grace the display tables of Barnes and Nobles. Shailja Patel is a Kenyan poet, playwright and theatre artist. Migritude is the transcript from one of her spoken word performance peaces. In poetic form, it traces the impacts of colonialism and postcolonialism and her own migration around the world. I’m not much of a reviewer or connoisseur of poetry, but I enjoyed reading the poems very much and found the images and phrasing powerful, beautiful and memorable.


Non-Fiction

*** Theories of Development (Richard Peet and Elaine Hartwick) ~ This book presents an overview of major theories of development (a.k.a. why some countries are poor and some are rich and what to do about it)—neoclassical, sociological, dependency, feminist etc… It does an excellent job of describing the different intellectual assumptions that underly these theories and how it influences the solutions that they advocate. Throughout all of this, the authors present their own view on development. While this book is an great primer on development, it can be at times a bit dull and confusing. The authors try their best to coin the development of these different theories, but sometimes end up listing a bunch of scattered conferences, papers and ideas.

** The Mystery of Capital (Hernando de Soto) ~ De Soto argues that what prevents poor countries from becoming rich is the lack of property law that enable individuals to transform their fixed assets into capital. He explores the history of property rights in America and examines the untapped wealth owned by the poor. De Soto’s assessment of the situation may be too idealistic and overromanticizes the potential of the small micro-businesses but his book still provides an accurate assessment to one of the significant reasons why the poor are still poor.

**** Third Sector Development (Christopher Gunn) ~ This book provides an excellent overview of various third sector organizations—credit unions, community land trusts, traditional nonprofit organizations and cooperatives. It highlights their role in American society and in particular focuses on how these organizations increase and create social surplus in their communities and contribute to development efforts.

*** Culture Jam (Kalle Lasn) ~ Written by the founder of Adbusters, this book describes and critiques our consumer and marketing oriented culture in America. The book explains concepts in a conversational and easy-to-understand tone, though at times it appears to be trying too hard to be cool. In particular, the book emphasizes meme warfare, and the importance of changing American consciousness and attitudes.

*** The Meaning of the City (Jacques Ellul) ~ From Cain’s first city to the new Jerusalem, Jacques Ellul traces the role that the city plays in the Biblical narrative. He highlights the city as a symbol and source of man’s pride, the city’s significance as a work of man’s hands and its importance in the new heavens and earth. While conversational, Ellul’s style and arguments can be hard to follow at times. There were definite sections of the book that were skimmed or “zoned” out as I was reading. That being said, Ellul has some real fire in his prose and his ideas were very provocative and insightful. His Biblical exposition of the city definitely provided a better framework for how I should relate to the city.

*** Not Just the Levees Broke (Phyllis Montana-LeBlanc) ~ Phyllis Montana-LeBlanc is from a working class family whose house and home were destroyed in Hurricane Katrina. The first part of this memoir narrates her family’s experience of the disaster, including the multiple day grueling aftermath of waiting to be rescued. The remaining portion of the memoir recounts Phyllis’ emotional life after the hurricane as she copes with her trauma and continues to grow in her faith in God and love and forgiveness for others. This memoir is no literary masterpiece but it manages to be very real, moving and powerful.

two roads diverged in a wood

I know you must all be annoyed with my endless sweatshop rants,* but I was surprised to find out yesterday that Judy Wicks, the founder of White Dog Café, co-founded Free People (which later became Urban Outfitters/Anthropologie clothing chain) with her then husband Richard Hayne.

It’s amazing how far apart these two business people’s paths have diverged since then:

Richard Hayne is currently the president of Urban Outfitters, the company that now operates the stores, Free People, Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie. He has a net worth of $1.8 billion, ranking the 262 richest person in the United States, atleast at the time in which this article was written.

His stores have stirred up quite a bit of controversy, both for politically incorrect t-shirts and allegedly ripping-off of independent designers. While people who shop at these stores tend to be liberal leaning, Richard Hayne is actually a die-hard Republican (not that that is necessarily a bad thing). Urban Outfitters evokes an aura of rebellion and independence while Anthropologie gives off a sense of vintage old world sophistication, but both are extremely corporate brands. Commodify your dissent all the way. Coolness and authenticity can now be purchased.

Furthermore, Hayne’s stance on sweatshops reflects the easy reasoning that sweatshops offer a better alternative to abject poverty (The Onion actually did an interesting video parody on sweatshops yesterday). I’ll let you be the judge:

"Years ago I visited one of the factories we work with in India, and there was 500 people standing in a line three people deep stretching around the building," he recalls. "I said to the foreman, 'What's going on?' He told me they were all applicants for the four positions they had open. I toured that facility and it was reasonably clean--for India. And it was reasonably well-lit--again, for India. And yes, it was mostly young women working there. But it is my understanding that the only other option those women had to feed their families was selling their bodies. So I don't want to hear people from the suburbs with their fat American stomachs telling people in other countries how to run their societies."

Meanwhile, Judy Wicks is not quite as wealthy as her former husband, but is by no means poor. (Let’s be honest- what would you really do with more than a billion dollars?) She is the founder of the restaurant White Dog Café, located near Penn campus. White Dog Café has become a renowned model for Triple Bottom Line business practices, with regard for profit, people and the environment. In addition to paying its restaurant workers living wages, White Dog Café also became one of the first restaurants to source local organic food long before Michael Pollan became trendy reading. She’s a vocal advocate for local sustainable economies and has written some interesting and inspiring articles on the subject.

Two very different versions of how to run a business in today's society. Richard Hayne was ingenious in creating the compelling pull of his brands**, managing to convince alot of us silly consumers into buying into image without substance, but Judy Wicks gives real hope. Her dissent has not been commodified.


* Though, is it not sad that nobody really cares passionately about anything anymore? And isn't it sad that we tend to think that those who care passionately about anything are a little loopy and crazy. Everything in moderation n’est ce pas?
** I have to guiltily admit that I love anthropologie clothing, but atleast in the last three years, I have been able to resist buying anything from the store despite the fact that it is located very close to my office. (It helps that it is really expensive) It's interesting though to read the customer target of anthropologie as described on Urban Outfitters corporate website:
... Over the past decade, we have traveled the globe, broken new ground with our catalog and web design, and most significantly of all, found customers who are our soulmates on this journey. Our core customer is 30 to 45, educated, fashionable, creative, and youthful. She values family and friends and loves shopping in the vibrant environments we create for her. Our unique and eclectic product assortment is carefully designed and selected with an eye for craftsmanship and detail...
Here's the Urban Outfitters description:
Our goal at Urban Outfitters is to be the brand of choice for well-educated, urban-minded young adults. We accomplish our objective by creating a differential shopping experience, which creates an emotional bond with the 18 to 30 year old target customer we serve. Currently, we operate more than 129 stores in the US, Canada, and Europe. Our stores offer a unique and eclectic mix of fashion merchandise in a lifestyle sensitive store environment. Products range from women's & men's apparel, accessories and footwear to items for the apartment, as well as gifts and novelties.

is this still an exercise in hope and cynicism?

Just yesterday, I rediscovered this passage from Thomas Merton tucked in between some of my old papers. A man I respected very much gave paper copies to me and two others while we were volunteering at the Woodstock Family Center in the summer of 2006. (Tim also posted it on his blog early January of this year.)

Somehow the weight and the wisdom of the passage did not quite register for me in the past, but when I read this yesterday, Merton's words were such a gentle yet truthful reminder of the futility of my half-hearted efforts and the hope that is to be had in my God.

Letter to a Young Activist

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.

You are fed up with words, and I don't blame you. I am nauseated by them sometimes. I am also, to tell the truth nauseated by ideals and with causes. This sounds like heresy, but I think you will understand what I mean. It is so easy to get engrossed with ideas and slogans and myths that in the end one is left holding the bag, empty, with no trace of meaning left in it. And then the temptation is to yell louder than ever in order to make the meaning be there again by magic. Going through this kind of reaction helps you to guard against this. Your system is complaining of too much verbalizing, and it is right.

...[T]he big results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen, and we can share in them; but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction which may be denied us and which after all is not that important.

The next step in the process is for you to see that your own thinking about what you are doing is crucially important. You are probably striving to build yourself an identity in your work, out of your work and your witness. You are using it, so to speak, to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation. That is not the right use of your work. All the good that you will do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God's love. Think of this more and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it.

The great thing after all is to live, not to pour our your life in the service of a myth: and we turn the best things into myths. If you can get free from the domination of causes and just serve Christ's truth, you will be able to do more and will be less crushed by the inevitable disappointments...

The real hope, then, is not in something we think we can do, but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see. If we can do His will, we will be helping in this process. But we will not necessarily know all about it beforehand...

Enough of this...it is at least a gesture...I will keep you in my prayers.

All the best in Christ,
Tom

christmas season

exercises in cynicism and hope (continued...)

"Any history of hope in America must ... make room at its center for this dogged companion of hope--the lurking suspicion that all our getting and spending amounts to nothing more than fidgeting while we wait for death"

~ Andrew DelBlanco in The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope

political apathy

It’s shocking how quickly I’ve stopped following political news and reverted back to my usual perusing of arts and letters daily and crafting websites. Shouldn’t I be more interested in politics now that a new administration is about to begin? Shouldn't I be more interested in following the news after all my rambling about the fact that our duties as a citizen do not end with just voting?

I wonder if my sudden drop in interest could be related to a sense of disenfranchisement from the political process. (Disenfranchisement—now that’s a melodramatic word). I voted for a few elected officials back in November, but now I seem to be out of the process, and without much power or say. Everyday, the headlines scroll by with Obama’s new picks for his cabinet, and I become aware that I do not have much ability as a citizen to influence his decisions.

It is to a much lesser degree, the same frustration I feel towards City Council’s decision to approve the zoning to build a casino in the Gallery in Philadelphia despite significant resident and city-wide protest. (Asian Americans United, Casino-Free Philadelphia and Chinese Christian Church and Center are all major organizers). And then there is an even greater frustration concerning Pennsylvania state’s decision to force Philadelphia to accept casinos. There’s a sense that decisions are made by important people in closed rooms and no matter how much protest and how many people hit the streets, nothing will change. Of course, history has proven that in many cases, community organizing has been effective at bringing about change (Montgomery bus boycott anyone?). But I find myself wishing there was a more direct and effective way of influencing the choices that affect us.

Or perhaps an easier explanation would be to say that I am so easily taken in by the spectacle of the election campaign, but not fully engaged yet to be interested in actual government policies, decisions and legislation.

Meanwhile, Canada’s government is going through some turmoil of its own. There’s a rather clear explanation on this knitter’s website.