19th Century Women Struggle For Independence Through Music

The Choir by Carol M. Cram is a book that I obtained through Book Funnel.  I decided to read it because it deals with women who sing even though they aren't supposed to be able to do so.  I love to sing!  

 

                                               

 

 So this novel deals with British lower class women forming a choir in the 19th century.  They aren't expected to have the leisure to sing. The lower class are supposed to be continually struggling to survive.   The women in the choir must deal with marriage and family commitments plus long work hours that conflict with their performances.

This book also deals with a male character who is blackmailed for being gay.  Gay characters are an interest of mine, but the last time I reviewed a novel on this blog that deals with a gay character, it was Michelangelo in Michelangelo and the Stone Mistress back in 2022 here .  

I am sometimes sentimental. So I'll admit that when there was a positive resolution to a relationship in this novel that had turned romantic, there were tears is my eyes.  I hope that readers are also moved by the emotional intensity of  certain relationships within the pages of this novel.   

                                          

                                                  

 

The Goal is to Eliminate Racism

I'm not aware of being racist, but that doesn't mean that I'm not.  Anti-racism is a step beyond thinking that I'm not a racist.  It's taking a stand that you will actively oppose racism. The book that I'm reviewing is How To Be An Anti-Racist .

                                                     

 

How To Be An Anti-Racist is the first book I've read by Ibram X. Kendi.  I think I may want to read The Black Camps Movement which is one of his previous works.  I definitely want to read his most recent book, Chain of Ideas, which I've placed on hold at the library. 

Some may think that racism causes no harm, but it definitely does.  It destroys the possibility of positive interaction with persons of other races.  Racism prejudices you against such a possibility.

 The book opens with Kendi as a teen.   He'd given an MLK Competition speech saying that Black youth believed that it was OK to be feared, not to think and not to value education.  He also said "They think it's OK to confine their dreams to sports and music."  He'd adopted a sports career as his aspiration himself.  He realized that he'd been reproducing racist ideas in his speech, but he ended that he still "had a dream" which is a reference to MLK's famous speech.  After that, he had nightmares about his racist speech.  

At that point I included this significant quote from How To Be An Anti-Racist:

" Internalized racism is the real Black on Black crime." 

One example of internalized racism was Kendi wearing hazel contact lenses.  He thought they made him look more White and that they looked better than his natural eye color which presumably looked more Black.  Why did he want to look more White? Why did he think it looked better? Kendi calls this Colorism which is a set of racist ideas about skin color.  So he was aware that this was racist, yet he continues to wear hazel contact lenses.  I consider this sad. 

Saying that you aren't racist means that you consider yourself neutral.  Kendi points out that  "there is no neutrality in the racism struggle".  You need to be fighting against the constructed hierarchy of the races in order to be anti-racist.  

It seems to me, that if racism is a fire that's burning down bridges between the races, you need to be anti-racist to fight the fire.

"Racist" isn't just an insult.  It describes the way someone categorizes other people.  You need to be able to identify racism in order to dismember the categorization process.

My father was part of the civil rights struggle as an active member of the American Civil Liberties Union.  I think he could be considered an anti-racist. 

"Our constitution is color blind," said U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Harlan is his dissent to Plessy v. Ferguson which legalized segregation in 1896.  Harlan also said that the White race would remain dominant "if it remains true to its great heritage."  This is a White supremacist statement, not a color blind one.  So Justice Harlan's statement should be considered unconstitutional.

"Racist" and "anti-racist" define thoughts and actions not "fixed identities", Kendi tells us.  Theoretically, we can be racist one minute and anti-racist the next.   Kendi no longer believes that a Black individual can't be racist.  He also no longer believes that the actions of a Black person reflect on him.  No one is a "race representative", but we need to focus on changing racist policies.  Unfortunately, I believe that so long as there are racist individuals, we can't prevent them from organizing to pass racist laws.  I don't consider that cynicism, I consider it realism.

Kendi says that the most threatening policy is race neutrality.  This is true for the same reason that a do nothing climate policy is the most threatening.  The non-white global south is the most victimized by climate change.  In the U.S.,  nearly 4000 areas that are mostly poor and non-white have higher rates of lead poisoning than Flint, Michigan.  Flint is pretty toxic, so that makes these 4000 areas ultra-toxic.  So if we had prioritized cleaning up poor non-white areas, the people who lived there wouldn't be dying of lead poisoning.

Kendi says that he is one generation removed from picking cotton.  I would like to point out that some Whites are also one generation removed from agricultural serfdom.  My grandmother was a serf which meant she worked in the fields involuntarily for no pay for a Polish count. I think that such exploitation was widely practiced in a number of parts of the world. 

One Black police officer was reported as saying that Negroes are "too stupid" to get a good education, so they could get a good job.  I guess when police are abusive and don't enforce the law properly, then being a cop is a terrible job. 

Kendi complains that 80% of teachers are White.  I recall reading that few Blacks can afford to train to be teachers in addition to taking the classes to get a B.A. as a prerequisite.

When I read about the hundreds of thousands of Black women having been involuntarily sterilized, I wrote in my notes that this was an attempt at medical race genocide. Another sign of medical race genocide was the statistic that Black women are three to four times more likely to die while pregnant than White women.  

Kendi points out the differences between protests and demonstrations.  I've always used these terms interchangably, but Kendi says they have specific definitions.  "A protest organizes people for a long lasting campaign that has the goal of bringing about change.  A demonstration is a short term mobilization to bring attention to a problem.  In that case, my most recent political actions have all been protests, not demonstrations.

I hadn't been aware that racist policies pre-exist racist ideas.  The ideas are elaborated in order to justify the policies.  This observation by Kendi made complete sense when I thought about it.  The reverse only makes sense in the context of someone studying racism.   Out in the real world, racist politicians want to start by implementing racism through policy.  

Of course the goal of rational people who want to live in a civilized society without racial conflict is to end racism.  That is what I hope for, and it's what Kendi hopes for too.  This attitude needs to spread as widely as possible.

                                                 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                  

 

 

                                                      

 

Three or More is a Riot: An Essay Collection

 When I received a copy of Three or More is a Riot  by Jelani Cobb, it was an advance reader copy that was approved by Random House the publisher.  I needed to download it from NetGalley. This means it wasn't published yet.  I was reading a novel at the time. So I needed to finish that book.  Then it took me three weeks to read and mull over this essay anthology.  In that time period, a great deal has happened--including the publication of Three or More is a Riot.  So I'm late by the publisher's standards.  

                                                             

The title of this book is the definition of "riot" in the criminal code.  It's not a riot unless three or more people are involved in "concerted unlawful actions".  

Unlike many essay anthologies, this one is written by a single writer.  Jelani Cobb authored all 59 pieces included in the collection.  

Cobb discusses how mixed race Barack Obama was defined as black by both the black and white communities.  Yet he was brought up by his white mother to be culturally white.  I imagine that being culturally white allowed Obama to be elected President of the United States. 

Cobb cites a  2010 Pew poll whose results were that 55% of the total respondents viewed Obama as black while a third saw him as mixed race.  Cobb believes that the history of slavery, rape and random relationships means that there really aren't any genetically pure blacks.  I hadn't really thought of that. Cobb is right, of course.   

Cobb points out that the election of Obama couldn't change the "complex relations between African American men and law enforcement".  When I lived in a primarily African American neighborhood from the late 1980's to the early 21st century, what I saw wasn't "complex".  It was a poor relationship.  Police wanted to intervene during social events and celebrations.  

I am now doing research for this review on more recent black population shifts since The Great Migration in which many Southern blacks moved North.  Cobb mentioned that there is currently a high population of blacks in the South.  I learned online that there has been a Second Great Migration of young well educated Northern blacks to Atlanta.  I am very well aware of a black migration to California, but this new generation of blacks moving southward was unknown to me. 

My main source for this information is a website for The Brookings Institution.  The Brookings Institution is a think tank that does research on the social sciences.  It was formed in 1916 and is located in Washington D.C.  I had heard of The Brookings Institution, but had never previously used it as a source of research. 

 Cobb makes a reference to Lincoln having "preternatural political abilities".  I have never been a fan of Lincoln myself ever since I learned that he abolished slavery due to political pressure. You know, he had to deal with a civil war.  You'd think someone with "preternatural political abilities" could have ended it with a great deal less bloodshed.   Maybe he was more of a man of his time than a man for the ages.

 Author Cobb attended Howard University, one of the big four  HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities).  So he includes discussion of  HBCUs in this book.  Thurgood Marshall, Kamala Harris, Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison are among those mentioned as graduates of HBCUs.  This implies that without HBCUs, it might have been a good deal more difficult for these important black figures to become prominent.  I had almost no awareness of HBCUs before reading this book.  So I was thoroughly educated in the significance of these institutions by reading Three or More is a Riot.

Cobb mentions that white run universities were segregated for decades. The university where I got my B.A. had few black students while I attended it.   I did notice that and imagined that the reason was financial, and that there was little availability of scholarships and financial aid for those students.  I knew that this was discriminatory, but didn't think I could do anything to remedy the situation.

I decided to take African American History.  The students in that class were almost entirely black.  It was assumed that whites like me wouldn't be interested in African American History.  Yet I was. I didn't know any African Americans, but I was a history major who was attracted to all types of history.   

So here's some black history.  In 1867 the main campus of Howard University was built.  Howard was intended to be a  university for blacks.  Its founder, Oliver Howard was a white man who thought very highly of African American soldiers that fought in the Civil War.  Howard was a general in the Union Army and had been appointed a Commissioner of the Freedman's Bureau.  Howard and the other trustees of the future Howard University purchased 150 acres of farmland on which the university would be built.  Charles Boynton, who had been the chaplain of the U.S. House of Representatives, was selected as Howard University's first president.  

The first black president of Howard wasn't appointed until 1926.  His name was Mordecai Wyatt Johnson.  He was so light skinned that he could be mistaken for white.  A photo of Johnson can be found in his Wikipedia article.

Charles Hamilton Houston, the first African American to make the Harvard Law Review, ran Howard University's law school.  Houston became future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall's mentor.  The two of them were responsible for the lawsuits that integrated U.S. schools in the 1950's. 

In 1934 there was a protest in which a line of Howard students wore nooses around their necks.  The students were demanding that Attorney General Homer S. Cummings stop the dozens of lynchings that were occurring across the U.S.  I didn't know that there were lynchings outside the former Confederate South.  I found a very disquieting article about lynchings in other parts of the country here.

In 1963 Albert Manley, the president of HBCU Spelman College, fired Howard Zinn, the head of Spelman's history department, for encouraging future author Alice Walker to participate in the civil rights movement. Albert Manley  was worried that Zinn's advice would upset white donors.  Possibly, but I'm upset that Zinn was fired for that reason.

In 1968 the students at HBCU Tuskegee University shut down the school and made a demand for more focus on African American studies.  They posted a sign on the front of the administration building which said BLACK UNIVERSITY.

Plessy v. Ferguson is a famous case, but I've never read anything about the facts involved.  Now I know from this book that it dealt with segregation in Louisiana railroad cars.  Homer Adolph Plessy was hoping that the case would bring about a "crusade for civil rights", but it had the opposite effect, says Cobb.  I wondered how that happened.  I looked it up online and decided that 1896 was just too early for the argument of equality between the races to succeed at such a high political level.  

Cases related to Plessy v. Ferguson were Buchanan v. Warley (1917) which outlawed housing discrimination covenants and Corrigan v. Buckley (1926) which restored housing discrimation covenants, Smith v. Allright (1944) which prohibited the Texas laws that disallowed black and Mexican voters from participating in primary elections, Sweatt v. Pamter (1950) which prohibited the exclusion of blacks from the University of Texas law school, and Brown v. the Board of Education which ended school segregation in 1954.  Future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall headed the legal team that won Brown v. the Board of Education.  He had more than thirty years of dealing with cases involving racial segregation.

Author Jelani Cobb is the dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.  He is also a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress.  He is also the producer of the documentary The Riot Report.  He won the Peabody Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary and is on the board of trustees of the New York Public Library.

I gave this book an A- because although this book is excellent and very thorough, I didn't read anything in it that was unexpected. 

                                                 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                 

                                  

Eaarth: Dealing With Our Longterm Environmental Disaster

  I lost interest in two books that I intended to read.   I'm now reading a used copy of a book that I purchased from my favorite bookstore.  The book is called Eaarth by Bill McKibben.  McKibben has re-named our planet because it's changed so radically due to environmental damage.

                                                     

 I'm starting this post on the last day of October 2025.  I wanted to finish Eaarth today to include it in my October reads.  I met that goal. This will be a long complicated review involving research, so I am very likely to be working on it in November.  I am glad to have had Bill McKibben's insights on environmental change.

What if illegal immigration to the United States is driven by climate ? I've never seen media speculation on the root causes of all this migration.  It's something to ponder while I read the headlines scrolling across the bottom of my TV screen as I watch the news.  

When I read in this book that petroleum supplies are dwindling , I looked up the number of electric buses that my local bus company has, and was alarmed by how few they were.  They've got to get to the goal of total electric conversion of their bus fleet ASAP.   Then I looked up the train system I use to get to other cities.  I was relieved to learn that they are 100% electric. 

 Another issue brought up in Eaarth is corporate agriculture causing economic difficulties.  Since corporate agriculture employs few people, it can result in more unemployment and crime.  People have to feed themselves.  If there are no legitimate jobs available, they may resort to illegitimate means of obtaining income.

 In one agricultural area in Brazil, there were once eleven subsistence farms.  Now there is a single corporate soybean operation, and the peasants have relocated to the edge of cities living in cardboard boxes. That sounds like the tragic circumstances of homeless people in the United States. There are increasing similarities between the U.S. and the Third World.

McKibben points out that suburbans have enough land around their homes that they could grow their own food.  He thinks that even New York City residents could supply 10-20%  of the produce they need by growing it themselves.  But what about NYC's pollution?  If I knew that food had been grown in a polluted environment, I would avoid it.  The reason why I eat organic is to avoid toxic chemicals.

McKibben mentions lack of sufficient water as a limitation for suburbans growing their own food.  He gives Las Vegas as an example where suburban agriculture wouldn't work.  I stayed with someone who lived in the suburbs of Las Vegas, and everyone had a garden.  According to Southern Nevada Water Authority, 90% of Las Vegas' water comes from the Colorado River and 10% comes from local ground water. 

As for New York's power, McKibben believes that rooftop solar and wind turbines could meet 81% of New York's power needs, but it seems to me that in some neighborhoods the solar panels would be stolen.  These neighborhoods would probably be too accessible for their own good.

McKibben thinks that since North Dakota can provide 14,300% of its needs, almost entirely through windmills, they could theoretically provide energy to other regions, but it would cost $100 billion to build the transmission lines.  So it would be cheaper for every locality to produce energy locally, if possible.  An Ohio wind farm would employ local people and the profits from getting it financed would go to Ohio banks, McKibben points out. 

Some people think windmills are ugly.  I don't understand that perspective and neither does McKibben.  We both think that windmills are beautiful. I've always admired medeival windmills.  McKibben says windmills are "the breeze made visible".  That's very poetic.

McKibben thinks that every region of the U.S. could potentially produce clean energy.  Hydropower could be an industry in the Northwest,  offshore wind could be generated on the East Coast, solar energy in the Southwest and in the Southeast biomass from forests could be the main source of sustainable power. 

McKibben blames the big utilities, who want to keep their power monopolies, for preventing clean energy from being implemented.  No doubt that's true. Yet OTOH,  McKibben says there are small companies that are using micropower plants to power a single building or a campus.  That's been 1/3 of all new power businesses in the U.S.   It plays a bigger role in the U.S. economy than new nuclear or coal plants. 

An article I found dealing with mini hydropower plants states that they are a major factor in irrigation projects throughout the world.  Bali was particularly mentioned as an example. 

  I imagine that small scale ventures will be the most successful means of implementing clean energy for the foreseeable future.

                                               

 

 

 

  

 

                                                 

 

Contemporary Killings on an Orkney Island

 I'm reviewing The Killing Stones which is a mystery by Ann Cleeves.  I have never previously read this author.  I got this book from Netgalley.  At the time it was in advance of  publication.  I'm sorry it took me so long to read the book, but I've been reading slowly lately. 

                                                                                                      

 

This book opens in a small village called Pierowall on an island named Westray in the Orkney archipelago (group of islands).  I immediately imagined a place where everyone knows way too much about everyone else.  So I thought that a murderer would have a hard time concealing that they had committed the crimes. On the other hand, solving murders and arresting perpetrators would be more of an issue for the authorities because there was no police station in Pierowall.  

There was mention of people routinely drinking and driving.  I thought that with the lack of a police presence, adults could be as irresponsible as teenagers when it came to drinking and driving.  What was the rate of vehicular homicide there?  This small village began to seem a good deal less than idyllic.  I wouldn't want to live there. 

I learned that cars were left unlocked because if you stole a car you couldn't leave the island with it unless you took the ferry, and then you'd get caught.   So drunk drivers weren't likely to commit vehicular homicide with a stolen car.  Jeez Louise!  I still don't want to live there.

 When the pathologist, Dr. Grieve, examined a murder victim in this case, he said that moving the body from the crime scene could contaminate it.  I thought that leaving it there could contaminate it too.  There might well be a storm.  Then all sorts of debris could contaminate the corpse.  Dr. Grieve added that he couldn't start the body on its journey to the mortuary in Aberdeen for the postmortem until tomorrow evening's Northlink ferry.  

I learned that the earliest ferries were established in the 19th century.  So the locals were living in 19th century conditions in the 21st century.  The crime scene investigation team also had to deal with 19th century conditions.   The pace of change there was glacial.

I wasn't interested in the characters, but the identity of the perpetrator surprised me.  On the other hand, the resolution was dragged out and I found that unenjoyable.  I didn't want to read this interminable drama focusing on the perpetrator who turned out to be totally repellent.  That's not surprising when you consider what this person did.

I hope the non-fiction that I'm reading next will be as extraordinary as it appears to be.   It would be nice to have a truly original book to review.

 

                                                             

  

American Historical Bios: From The 18th Century to the 21st Century

It seemed to me to take forever for me to read The Small and the Mighty  by Sharon McMahon. Although the persons dealt with in each chapter weren't well known, the events covered were not quite so obscure. 

                                               

   

For example, I knew Senator Charles Sumner was beaten by someone with a cane. Yet I had never heard of Congressman Preston Brooks who was the perpetrator of the beating.  I knew Brooks wasn't censured for attacking a Senator in the Senate chamber, but I didn't know that he was re-elected a month later.  So the man who attacked Sumner suffered no political penalty for his action.  

Although I've seen the film  Mary Poppins I don't recall the song "Sister Suffragette" at all.  I just listened to it and it wasn't familiar, but then I saw Mary Poppins more than sixty years ago.

I found out that the Kansas referendum on slavery was totally corrupt. Most Kansas residents were too poor to own slaves.  Pro-slavery people from Missouri voted in the Kansas election illegally, and abolitionists from outside Kansas also voted in that election.  Four dozen people were killed for political reasons.  Homes and businesses were destroyed.

I was amused to learn that in September 1973 the Ojibwe Adam Fortunate Eagle went to Italy dressed in Ojibwe regalia, and claimed to have discovered Italy, just as Columbus was supposed to have discovered North America. Fortunate Eagle was invited to meet Pope Paul VI, but refused to kiss the Pope's ring.

It interested me that Japanese Americans living in Hawaii weren't incarcerated during WWII.  I suspect that the authorities weren't able to distinguish between Japanese Americans and Native Hawaiians. I find this amusing.  

Japanese-Americans who were incarcerated have tended to want to be extremely patriotic after WWII.  It seems to me that they weren't sent to camps because they weren't patriotic.  This happened because the United States was at war with Japan.  If the U.S. is ever at war with Japan again, Japanese Americans would be rounded up and confined just as they were in WWII.   Their personal patriotism would be irrelevant.

 There was some discussion of prominent Japanese American Norman Mineta's personal experience with being discriminated against in housing after he returned from combat in World War II.  I looked  up his political career on Wikipedia and discovered that Mineta was the first Asian American Mayor of a major city (San Jose) and a U. S. Congressman.  He also served in the cabinets of both Clinton and George W. Bush.  So Presidents from both parties appointed him to cabinet positions.

On September 11, 2021,  Norman Mineta was in a bunker with Vice President Dick Cheney.  They saw the hijacked plane that was headed to the Pentagon explode.  Mineta phoned the head of of the Federal Aviation Administration and told him to ground every plane immediately. 4,546 civilian planes were grounded.  Some were diverted to Canada. Many pilots were only told that there had been a "security incident".   Canada grounded all flights except flights bound for the U.S. to allow them to land safely.

Given what happened on 9/11, it seemed likely that U.S. airlines would discriminate against Muslim or Middle Eastern passengers.  Mineta sent a letter to all American civilian carriers telling them not to profile Muslim or Middle Eastern passengers or subject them to additional inspection. 

 In a chapter about Septima Clark, ( I had read about her in Spell Freedom, the last book I reviewed on this blog) I discovered that Clark learned to speak Gullah and Geechee. 

 I learned from The Gullah Society that Gullah and Geechee are two different cultures.  Many of the Gullah came from Gambia, Senegal and Sierra Leone.  They live on the South Carolina Sea Islands and the coast of Georgia. The article doesn't specify what countries in Africa the Geechee came from, but they don't live on the Sea Islands like the Gullah. They live on the Georgia coast and Northeastern Florida.  The name Geechee may have come from the  Ogeechee River in Georgia.  The Geechee may have predominately lived on the coast of that river.

 The Gullah language is influenced by the Krio, Wolof and Bambara languages of West Africa. We are told by the Gullah Society article that Geechee language is influenced by different African tongues than the Gullah language, but we are given no specifics.

The Gullah and Geechee do have specific dishes associated with each cultural group. The Gullah dishes are Gullah red rice, shrimp and grits and okra soup.  The Geechee dishes are frog legs , crab bisque and peanut soup.  The first two Geechee dishes are associated with French cuisine.  The peanut soup is also called Tuskegee soup and is made with peanut butter rather than milk. It is called Tuskegee soup because George Washington Carver, who did experiments with peanuts, worked at the Tuskegee Institute.

A black woman in Alabama named Recy Taylor was gang raped by six white men.  Taylor's house was firebombed because she reported the gang rape.  Two all white grand juries refused to charge the six rapists.  So the NAACP sent Rosa Parks to investigate.  I  wasn't aware that Rosa Parks investigated crimes.  I'd only heard of her in the context of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

For the first time I read about what happened in the aftermath of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.  Snipers fired at integrated buses.  Four churches and the homes of their ministers were firebombed.  Reverend Ralph Abernathy, whose church had been firebombed, said to his parishioners that they should pray "for those who'd desecrate the House of God."  Two Klu Klux Klan members were indicted for these bombings.  They confessed but an all white jury found them not guilty.

In 2019 all the records of the Highlander Folk School were destroyed. This was where Tennessee voters learned how to pass literacy tests. My last review on this blog was of a book dealing with the Highlander Folk School which can be found here.

 I am happy to say that a statue of Rosa Parks was also erected in 2019.

I would like to end this review with the following quote from The Small and the Mighty:

"Education is liberation.  And an educated population is difficult to oppress." 

   

                                                 

 

  

 

 

Spell Freedom: Voting Rights and the Civil Rights Movement

When I bought Spell Freedom by Elaine Wells, I didn't realize how important it would turn out to be.  The focus of the book is on voting registration and election participation in the Deep South.

                                                         

                                                                                                                 

I learned about the origins of the song "We Shall Overcome".  It was originally a church hymn with different lyrics.  I first learned this song in Hebrew in which the title is "Ahnachnu Nitgaber"

 Myles Horton  founded a school to teach Black citizens what they needed to know in order to vote.  During the era of McCarthyism , the Horton school was considered to be communist.  The school didn't teach communism.  It taught literacy and basic knowledge about citizenship. 

I was impressed to learn that Eleanor Roosevelt had her own newspaper column.  No other First Lady had a newspaper column either before or since.

The lynching of Emmett Till was mentioned. I had previously written about Emmett Till on this blog in a review of  Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes.

The Horton school survived and continued to be a resource for Black voters in the South.   At one point Nelson Rockefeller provided the Horton school with funds.

 

                                                   

 

 

 

 

 

Renters Unite!

I'm happy that I'm still able to read two books a month.  I did finish this book, Renters Unite by Jacob Stringer, in May.  So it's the second book I read in May.  Yet in the context of this blog, it counts as a June post.   

I received Renters Unite, which deals with tenant organizing, from the publisher. I then prioritized it because I'm interested in the issue.

                                                   

While doing research on Renters Unite for this review, I learned that single room occupancy residency hotels (SROs) don't exist anymore.  I did live in one briefly some time ago.  The lack of SROs has probably increased homelessness in the United States.  I would think that tenant advocates would want to keep such an option available.  People who live in hotels have different payment arrangements than tenants who live in an apartment or a room in a privately owned home. They pay the manager by the week rather than by the month, and probably have no clue who the hotel owner might be. I would think it's unsustainable to actually live in a hotel on a permanent basis.                                                     

The author, Jacob Stringer, is British.  This is why I am bringing up his use of the term "neoliberal". The American term "liberal" and the British "neoliberal" could be considered opposites in terms of the American political spectrum.  The American liberal is on the left side of that spectrum, and the British "neoliberal" is on the right side of the American spectrum.   In fact , it seems to me that British neoliberalism is the equivalent of the laissez-faire capitalism of the author Ayn Rand. ( The last time I dealt with Ayn Rand on this blog, it was in a post dealing with a collection of essays on Joss Whedon TV series here.)

I discovered that the UK has a Libertarian Party which would have been neoliberal.  According to the Wikipedia article dealing with this party, in 2008 Libertarian Party UK sent all the members of Parliament  a copy of George Orwell's 1984 with the note "This book was a warning, not a blueprint." 

There was a tenant union in Crown Heights, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. I know something about many of the Jews who resided in Crown Heights.  The Hasidim (a type of Jewish sects that emphasized religious zeal rather than scholarship) who lived in Crown Heights wouldn't have been involved in tenant unions.  Their leaders, known as Rebbes rather than Rabbis, would not have approved of such a secular activity. 

One of the ten demands of the Sindicat de Llogators, a tenant organization in Spain, was that empty properties must become public housing.  I expect that most, if not all, empty properties would be in poor condition.  They would require a great deal of work to become habitable.  So they would either continue to sit empty, or the government would sell them to private parties who would build expensive housing with high rents.

Another of the ten demands is ending property speculation "by legislating its tools out of existence".  The most important tool of property speculation in this era is the internet.  I don't think it would be a good idea to legislate the internet out of existence.  So long as the internet continues to exist, doing away with websites where property speculation takes place would be a game of whack a mole.  For every property speculation website that is made illegal, a hundred or a thousand more would pop up.  

Then there's the demand that private landlords must charge the same rent as the government charges for public housing to poor families in danger of eviction.  The landlords would claim that they'd go bankrupt.  They won't have enough funds for property taxes or making repairs if they charged the same rent as is charged for public housing.  They would sell their properties to the government, and move to a country where they could charge as much they wanted.  That country would probably be the United States.  

                                                   

                                                "Rent is both the result of inequality

                                                     and a multiplier of inequality!"                                                                                                          

                                                                 Jacob Stringer 

 

Later in this book I read about MST, Brazil's Landless Workers Movement.   They believe that land occupations improve people's lives.  They're converting jungle that is owned by no one into privately owned plantations where they can grow crops for export.

There is no consideration for the multiplicity of species that have lived in that jungle for countless millennia, and the impact on indigenous peoples who have also lived in that jungle.  The destruction of the jungle also has a huge impact on climate change for our entire planet.  We actually needed that jungle. So what seems like a wealth multiplier for Brazil has devastating impact on all of us. 

 

                                                       

     

                                                                        

 

  

Spirit Crossing

I've previously read two books by William Kent Krueger. They are This Tender Land which I reviewed here and The River We Remember which I reviewed on this blog here .   I obtained my copies of both books from the facilitator of the formerly F2F book club that I now attend online. 

 Apparently, Blogger has decided to make important formatting options less available since the last time I wrote a review here on Shomeret: Masked Reviewer.  It's just an inconvenience, but I wish they hadn't done that.

 Spirit Crossing is my third Krueger novel which I just finished. It's #20 in the Cork O'Conner thriller series, but I hadn't read any of the previous books in the series. I am not the sort of person who reads in order.  Reading out of order has never been a problem for me.  

I learned that Spirit Crossing, the title of this novel, is a sacred place on the Jiibay River in Minnesota.  Jiibay means ghost in the language of the local indigenous people.   There are protests over an oil pipeline in this area. 

Cork O'Connor, the series protagonist, is a former sheriff in Aurora, Minnesota.  He is part Irish and part Anishinaabe.  The Wikipedia article about this native people can be found at Anishinaabe, but Ojibwe is frequently used as this people's name throughout Spirit Crossing. 

 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow confused matters with his narrative poem Hiawatha.  Hiawatha is supposed to have been an Ojibwe warrior, but Longfellow's poem was about the formation of the League of the Iroquois in what is now New York.  I'm not sure why a Midwestern Ojibwe would have been a central character in such a narrative.  

But let's get back to the book I'm discussing. This is going to be my complete review of Spirit Crossing. I will be posting a briefer version on Goodreads.

                                                       

 

Cork O'Connor's grandson, whose legal name is Aaron Smalldog O'Connor, is nicknamed Waaboo which means little rabbit in Ojibwe.  Waaboo is only seven years old, yet he is a pivotal character in Spirit Crossing.  He is known by his nickname throughout the novel.  Waaboo is believed to be paranormally gifted.

There was a young woman from a wealthy family named Olivia Hamilton who had disappeared.  The FBI was involved in the search for her because it was thought that she might have been taken to another state.  Olivia's family was offering $50K for information leading to the finding of Olivia.  

When a grave was found in a wooded area, Waaboo said that the woman buried there was lost and that she looked like an Ojibwe.  If this was true, this meant that she couldn't be Olivia Hamilton.  The FBI lost interest.  Waaboo's father, Daniel, took Waaboo home while Cork O'Connor stayed at the grave site.

I learned the identity of the woman who was buried in that grave on page 140.  In most crime novels the victim or victims would be mentioned during the first chapter.  To have it take more than a hundred pages is highly unusual. This woman had been missing, and no one cared enough to report it to the authorities.  Daniel thought no one reported her missing because she was Native American.

Tragedy played a central role in this novel.  I tend to think that there is enough sadness in real life to want to see very much of it in fiction.

 

                                                         

  

 

 

 

 

The Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu Tell Us How To Be Happy

  I have read a book with the Dalai Lama's name on the cover before.  It was A Call For Revolution which was co-written with Sophia Stril-Rever.  I reviewed it on this blog here.    

                                     

The Dalai Lama has what seems to be a precursor book called The Art of Happiness written with the psychiatrist Dr. Howard C. Cutler.  I have not read The Art of Happiness, however.  So I can't be sure how comparable it is to The Book of Joy. Both books do have similar themes. 

The context of the coming together of the authors of The Book of Joy was that Archbishop Tutu joined the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala because the South African government wouldn't give the Dalai Lama a visa. The Archbishop also met exiled Tibetans in Dharamsala.  He wanted to assure them that they could take back Tibet just as Black South Africans had managed to reclaim South Africa from those who had imposed apartheid on them.  

In addition to the Tibetan Buddhist and Christian aspects, The Book of Joy addresses the scientific study of meditation.  The Dalai Lama said that he found the scientific approach to meditation inspiring.  

We learn from The Book of Joy that the Archbishop Tutu's daughter, Mpho, is a lesbian who sought to become an Anglican minister. Unfortunately, she was forced to choose between her marriage to a woman and her church.  The Anglican Church officially does not allow its clergy to have same sex marriages. Yet the Episcopalian Church of the United States, which was originally derived from the Anglican Church, does allow its clergy to marry members of the same sex.  This is why Archbishop Tutu's daughter, Mpho Tutu Van Furth chose to become an Episcopalian priest.  The Archbishop supported his daughter's choices.

I had previously read about South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission which was mentioned in this book. I had first encountered it in the novel How The Water Falls by K.P. Kollenborn which I reviewed here, and in the novel He Does Not Die A Death of Shame by Jack Hoffmann which I reviewed here.  This commission dealt with testimony from witnesses and with applications for amnesty from those who violated the rights of individuals during the struggle against apartheid. 

The commission was chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.   I believe that Archbishop Tutu would have played his role in chairing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission with integrity. When I started this book, I knew nothing about Desmond Tutu other than his name.  Now I respect him. I know now that he received the Nobel Peace Prize.  I am also aware that he is deceased.  This is public information.  I don't believe that the concept of spoilers applies to non-fiction books especially when the facts involved are well known.

You should read this book for the synergy between the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu.   I am convinced that together they sparked insights that might not exist otherwise. 

I was amused by the Dalai Lama's agile riposte to the Chinese Communist Party's insistence that they want to find the 15th Dalai Lama.  He said let them recognize the reincarnations of their own deceased Communist leaders before they become involved with finding the next Dalai Lama.  He mentions recently dead Chinese leaders.  I'd love to know about the reincarnation of Chairman Mao myself.  

This book is intended for general readers, not academic scholars. There are no footnotes or endnotes.  I also searched in vain for an index or a bibliography.  If the readers of this blog do want academic scholarship on the Dalai Lama or Desmond Tutu, they might search the websites of local college libraries for such content.  If they have no borrowing privileges there, they may still actually go to the library.  They will probably be able to be view it there.  I have gone to the libraries of universities that I don't attend and examined books on the premises.  Academic librarians have no problems with courteous users who respect the rules of the library.

                                  

Resurrection Walk: A Complex Legal Thriller

I wanted to have a mystery or thriller to start off April.  I had recently purchased Resurrection Walk by Michael Connelly from the public library's bookstore, and it seemed to fill the bill. I've never read Connelly before.  Goodreads informs me that this is #7 in the Lincoln Lawyer series and the 38th book in which Harry Bosch appears. Those who are RIO types (Read in Order) would probably tell me to start with the first Harry Bosch book, The Black Echo, but I'm an UOOOR (Unrepentant Out Of Order Reader).  These are abbreviations used on the Mystery/Thriller Group on Goodreads.  Those who have been reading this blog for some time may have noticed that reading in order is unimportant to me, and that I don't choose my books on that basis. 

I looked up The Black Echo on Goodreads and discovered that there is backstory on Harry Bosch that may be significant.  So I thought I really should read The Black Echo and placed a hold on it at my public library.

                                   

Since I have an interest in deaf issues, I took note that Harry Bosch is partially deaf.  It apparently isn't central to the character.  His hearing loss is only brought up one time.  I was surprised to read that it was due to his cancer treatment.  Bosch has leukemia .  I ran a search on hearing impairment and cancer treatment. I discovered an article on the subject from Harvard Medical School  here.   I welcome being educated by my review process.  Hearing impairment came up because Harry Bosch can't hear pings from his phone.  So he relies on vibration for incoming calls. 

Harry Bosch investigates for lawyer Mickey Haller who has the billboard slogan "Reasonable doubt for a reasonable fee."  A character wonders how Haller gets away with that slogan.  I realized that it implies possible unethical behavior--manufacturing reasonable doubt in a case that's really cut and dried.  Haller and Bosch are half-brothers.

Harry Bosch's daughter asked him to stop working for Mickey Haller, and focus on his recovery from cancer. Bosch is participating in a clinical trial that Haller discovered.  Other side effects of his experimental cancer treatment included mild nausea and vertigo. Bosch told his daughter that working for Haller made him feel better emotionally.  When he isn't doing any work for Haller, Bosch feels useless and depressed.

The murder victim in this case, Roberto Sanz, had a shootout with gang members before his death.  Yet Roberto's ex-wife, Lucinda, had been charged.  Lucinda had pleaded nolo contendere which means no contest.  The case wouldn't be brought to trial with that plea, and Lucinda went to prison.  Bosch didn't think Lucinda Sanz was guilty. It seemed to me that Lucinda wouldn't even have been aware of the option of pleading nolo contendere unless she'd been instructed to do it. 

 The case was brought to trial after Lucinda had served more than five years of her sentence. At that point, there was considerable doubt that Lucinda had killed her ex-husband, Roberto.

The verdict in this case would be a huge spoiler.  So I definitely won't include it in this review.  I was never certain of the result of the trial until the verdict was announced.  There were a number of plot twists  that made Resurrection Walk a superior legal thriller.

 

                                      

 

 

 

 

Miracles and Wonder

 I do occasionally read Christian theology, particularly if a woman wrote it.  I don't recall when I read author Elaine Pagels previously because it was a pre-computer read.  I'm pretty sure that it was The Gnostic Gospels, and that I was impressed with it.  Since I have no record of reading it, I don't have any further remarks.

 I recently finished reading Pagels' book Miracles and Wonder.  I received a copy from Net Galley for review.  So I'm reviewing it here and will post an excerpted version of the review on Goodreads as I am in the habit of doing. 

                                     

                                           

Each chapter addresses a theological question based on the gospels.  Pagels thinks that Jesus' followers were "papering over inconvenient facts".  One problem was Jesus being regarded as "illegitimate". So the early Christians decided that his mother was made pregnant by God.  Other problems  were Jesus being tossed into a common grave and his rising from the dead.  He also shouldn't be seen as a failed Jewish messiah who never established a kingdom in Israel, as the Jewish messiah is expected to do.  Yet Pagels' Jesus really needs no actual kingdom because he lives within us.

She tells us that when she quotes Greek translations of the Christian Gospels, they are her own translations.  They literally are Greek to me.  I know no Greek, and would therefore have no way of checking or confirming Pagels' translations.

This author believes that people are continually being attracted to Jesus because his stories are revised to respond to whatever the current issues are in each era.

One of my issues is egalitarianism.  In this book, there are numerous quotes from Psalms that focus on egalitarianism and justice.  Though I do have to say that Psalms is attributed to a King.  Monarchy is not an egalitarian institution, nor a particularly just one.

Pagels points out that if Jesus was the son of Mary and Joseph, he can't be the son of God.  I actually don't care about Jesus' parentage myself.

Pagels thinks that Jesus called himself "the Son of Man" in order to avoid calling himself either the son of God or a messiah.  Pagels says that "Son of Man" is a cover for his true identity, like Clark Kent was for Superman.

It piqued my interest when Pagels said that the Kingdom of God might be "an earthly kingdom with divine values".   To me, this description points right at Tibet.   I'm a fan of novels that take place in Tibet--most notably by Eliot Pattison.  I'd like to call my readers' attention to a review of Pattison's Bones of the Earth that I posted to this blog here.

But let's get back to Jesus.  Some of Jesus' miracles can be explained.  Pagels tells us about an instance from the Gospel of Mark in which Jesus brought back a girl from the dead. Yet she may have been in a coma.  Coma comes from the Greek word meaning "to sleep".  Jesus tells her in Aramaic "Little girl, get up."  She rises immediately and begins to walk.  

 Jesus would often tell people, "Your faith has healed you." Pagels wonders if these healings happened as a result of the placebo effect.  That seems likely to me. 

Sometimes Pagels makes statements that I know to be inaccurate or confused. For example, she says that the Romans re-named Israel as Judea.   

After the reign of King Solomon, the Jews had two kingdoms.  They were the Kingdom of Judea and the Kingdom of Israel.  They were two different territories geographically.  The Kingdom of  Judea's capital was Jerusalem, and the Kingdom of Israel's capital was Samaria. This comes from the biblical Books of Prophets. 

 Later, when the people of the Kingdom of Judea went into exile in Babylon, the people of the Kingdom of Israel stayed in Palestine. The practices of the Judeans evolved in Babylon by becoming much more codified.  The practices of the Kingdom of Israel became more polytheistic, and therefore no longer recognizable as Jewish.  The Kingdom of Israel was eventually conquered by the Assyrians.  Its people became thoroughly assimilated by their conquerors.                                                                   
When the Persians conquered Babylon, the Jews living in Babylon were encouraged to return to where they had lived in Judea.  Many of them did so, though a great many remained in Babylon. 

The four paragraphs above this one are the historical background that Pagels either didn't know or chose not to include.

I am bemused by Pagels' statement that stories of Jesus feeding people "strips the gospel narratives of meaning".  Generosity may not be a miracle, but it is significant.  Can't Jesus be both a messiah and generous?  It doesn't invalidate the claim of being a messiah, and in fact makes him even more worthy of that title.  

Pagels wonders what is left of the Jesus story when the legends and myths are stripped away.  Well, that's easy.  There have been some really great men who have benefited humanity since Jesus.  Some of them were certainly inspired by Jesus.  The Reverend Martin Luther King comes to mind for both me and Pagels.  His stature needs no miracle stories to assure him a place in history.  I think the same can be said of Jesus.  

I discovered from this book that the artist Marc Chagall painted crucifixions .  Previously,  I'd only seen Jewish identified Chagall paintings.   Pagels specifically mentions The White Crucifixion.  The link provided is from marcchagall.net.

I also learned from Pagels that the majority of the Dalits of India are Christians.  This isn't surprising since they were vilified as Untouchables in Hinduism for so many centuries.   

I found out from this book that there is a South African movie called The Son of Man.  It interprets the story of Jesus in terms of the struggle against apartheid.  That's a fascinating approach, but Pagels reveals that it depicts Mary Magdalene negatively.  She also discusses a British film called Mary Magdalene but comments I saw online dissuaded me from seeing it.

A book on the bibliography called The Cross and the Lynching Tree drew my interest.  I intend to read it, but I'm not certain when I can get to it. 

I thought that Miracles and Wonder was conceptually interesting, but I was surprised by what Pagels didn't seem to know. So I'm giving it four stars on Goodreads.