Questlove is a genius. I’ve been a fan for decades – and reading his latest book, Creative Quest, has made me even more enthusiastic. He is an amazing artist.
Probably best known as the drummer and leader of the Roots, the band on the NBC’s Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Questlove is a musician, arranger, DJ, composer, author, producer (music, theater and more), writer, critic, foodie, teacher and all-round creative force. I first heard him DJ in the early 2000s in clubs and was hooked – and I’ve been regularly looking for events where he performs ever since. The breadth of music that he pulled together in his shows was always impressive and exciting. Creative Quest explains how and why – and quite a bit about his thinking, work habits, and creative processes.
Written as much as a discussion as a traditional book (and I imagine that it would be a great on audio), Creative Quest is driven by Questlove’s interest in creativity. He wonders if he is truly creative – and the narrative explores different kinds of creative processes. It’s a lesson book and an autobiography, as Questlove explains how he and other artists wrestle with questions of borrowing, originality, dry spells, failure and partnership. He makes suggestions and also assigns tasks. For example:
Begin each day by believing the opposite of everything you believe.
Think of two artists you know, who you consider to be very different, and imagine what project they would make if they collaborated.
When you’re having trouble thinking of new ideas, go to one your old ideas and rework it.
Imagine creating an exhibition of all the things that inspire you, and imagine how you would arrange the works in the show.
Giving the book a unique flavor is the breadth of Questlove’s experiences and wisdom. Influences range from J. Dilla to Joseph Brodsky, from Bjork to young chefs looking to make a mark, and many, many others. He has an ability to pull creative people into his orbit and that makes this a very interesting book.
I don’t know if this will make readers more creative, but it will make you think. And I don’t know – it just might help with your creative processes, too.
If you think about Cabrini-Green without any knowledge of Chicago or the history of public housing, the associations that probably come to mind are extremely negative: rampant violence and poverty, created by the government. Cabrini-Green, a former public housing complex in the near North Side of Chicago, achieved a kind of amazing notoriety. But was it always a failure? And why and how did it turn out so badly? These are important questions that Chicago resident and writer Ben Austen tackles in High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing. It’s an important corrective to a complicated history.
Austen takes a chronological approach to the creation of Cabrini-Green: its conception, development, challenges and demise. He focuses on the voices and stories of the people who lived there – and his attention to their narratives is most welcome. If we really consider housing and homes, we know that they are not just bricks and layouts, or architects and developers and politicians. Housing has to be about the people who lived in the homes. Reading High-Risers gives a thoughtful account of the residents of Cabrini-Green and a history of the project, which was also a neighborhood and community.
Austen’s narrative makes clear that the fate of Cabrini-Green was not predetermined – any more than other large block public housing efforts were destined for failure. The book is good on the local political and economic factors that made Cabrini-Green so problematic. Austen explains the neighborhoods, the power structures, and above all, the pervasive racism and segregation. He explains the ways that violence, especially gang violence, tore the families and communities within Cabrini-Green
What High-Risers does not address is the larger shifts in American public policy that stacked the deck against public housing. What happened in Chicago was not unique. Changing funding streams, different expectations at the city level, and a host of other factors have made successful public housing extremely challenging. We’re living with the consequences of those decisions today.
High-Risers explains Cabrini-Green and quite a bit about Chicago. Austen’s contribution is most welcome to understanding this fascinating city.
New York City, Gotham, a space of opportunity or threat? Or perhaps both?
Brian Tochterman is an associate professor of sustainable community development at Northland College and the author of The Dying City: Postwar New York and the Ideology of Fear. The book is a reworking of his University of Minnesota history dissertation, but it’s not traditional history. This is cultural and intellectual history, with little economics, demographics, political studies – and few “great men.” Tochterman, who is from the midwest, has a provocative perspective on New York City in the latter part of the twentieth century.
The Dying City spans from the end of World War II until the early 1980s. Tochterman posits two discourses about the city: cosmopolis, as exemplified by the optimism of a young E.B. White, and necropolis, as defined by Mickey Spillane. These visions and narratives competed as ways to best understand and define a rapidly changing New York City. White presented the city as open, young, growing and inclusive; Spillane represented the city as dangerous, a frontier with little order calling out for violence and strong men. From these two constructs, Tochterman spins a web of voices, actions, debates and decisions to explain the Big Apple.
The book draws from literature, film, popular culture, criticism, music and media. It’s not comprehensive. Instead, Tochterman’s methodology is more opportunitistic and impressionistic. He crafts arguments of contrast: White and Spillane, Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, growth versus destruction. Running throughout the narrative is a heightened appreciation of how narratives of fear framed debates, decisions and cultural production. The books makes one appreciate just how pervasive fear is as a justification, a motivator, and as a means of control.
One of the challenges of cultural history is inclusivity. Most people do not get published, do not produce “culture” and their voices and influence may not be recognized. I think that the issue especially difficult in framing what happens in the city, where interactions between people and groups of people spark all manner of creativity. New York City has been a tremendous engine for cultural production. Tochterman’s construct tends to focus on the work made by white and educated professionals. There’s nothing wrong with that focus, but is it the most representative? He could have done something similar but given priority to the origin and growth of hip hop and rap, for example. Who matters more: E. B. White or Grandmaster Flash? There are no easy answers – just different framings.
One could claim, using a more traditional history lens, that there are more “accurate” ways of understanding the sweeping changes New York City faced after World War II. One could pay close attention to demographics, to changes in the economy, to broad political trends, and the general shift of influence to the west and the south. However, that is a different kind of book. Tochterman has crafted something thoughtful in The Dying City. It’s creative and well done. And while it may be a bit too dissertation-like for some, I found it very interesting.
Why does America imprison so many people? And why are those who lives are all tangled up in our criminal justice system so often people of color? It is a question that drove James Forman, Jr., to write an extraordinarily powerful and important book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. The book has received a great deal of well-deserved attention. Forman, a professor of law at Yale, makes it clear that this issue is central to understanding crime and justice in the US.
Forman, a former public defender, opens the narrative recounting the sentencing of a young black man in a Washington, D.C., all-black courtroom. He is angered, frustrated, upset, and wonders: “How did a majority-black jurisdiction end up incarcerating so many of its own?” The book is a well-researched attempt to answer that question, looking at politics, economics, and social history. Forman readily acknowledges the role of whites to promote mass incarceration, but his focus here is on black leadership and black communities. Doing so, he highlights extremely important issues of class. In 2000, “the lifetime risk of incarceration for black high school dropouts was ten times higher than it was for African Americans who attended college.”
The book is organized into two parts: origins and consequences. Forman’s personal experience as an attorney, a public defender, and community member buttresses his research throughout. He starts with the 1970s and the debate over marijuana laws and their enforcement. Within the Washington, DC community, David Clark, an African-American lawyer, successfully ran for city council with an aim to end prison as a potential penalty for marijuana possession. Then, as now, a drug possession conviction could have negative consequences for someone’s entire life.
Moderate as Clarke’s proposal was, it struggled to gain acceptance. Many political leaders in the black community worried about heroin and believed that any weakening of anti-drug laws would cause further problems. The bill died, foundering on the shores of moral hazard.
At the same time, a growing crime epidemic in DC within the black community outraged law-abiding citizens. With increasing calls for “getting tough on crime,” gun control legislation passed in the District. Dissenters unsuccessfully argued that it would weaken the right to defend one’s self. The result were stiffer penalties for gun possession without systemic efforts to address the causes of crime.
Forman’s chapter on the integration of color into the police is worthy of lengthy analysis on its own. He notes that “the case for black police has always been premised on the unquestioned assumption of racial solidarity between black citizens and black officers.” As it turns out, that assumption was and remains incorrect.
Consequences picks up with changes in sentencing in the 1980s. Forman explains how many in the black community in DC were let down by police and the courts – and how that frustration led to calls for longer and harsher sentences. Drug dealers were excoriated by black leaders. Mandatory sentencing was championed by many who distrusted the system. In 1982, Initiative 9 was overwhelming passed in an District-wide election. It called for a minimum mandatory sentence of five years for committing a violent felony with a gun for the first offense and ten years for all further offenses. Selling heroin netted a four-year minimum sentence, with two years for cocaine and one year for large amounts of marijuana. And again, not much was done to address underlying causes or treatment.
A serious problem that became a media frenzy, the epidemic of crack cocaine in the late 1980s and early 1990s led to greater gang violence and even more dramatic responses. Political leaders – often African American – hyped anti-crime measures and and increased policing presence. Forman rightly calls this the rise of “warrior policing.” In addition to more police sweeps, more violence, assets were seized. The toll on the black community was devastating, both from crack and the response to it.
The book concludes with implementation of “stop and frisk” and an epilogue that summarizes how we got to mass incarceration: “the result of a series of small decisions, made over time, by a disparate group of actors.” It is rare to see so many efforts over so long to address problems with policy choices that have not done what many have hoped. Forman argues that if we are to do something about these issues and the resulting institutional race and class problems, we will have to recognize the failures and start with small steps. In other words, we have take it apart the same way it was built, with securing local political support and greater awareness. While this may not be optimistic conclusion, it is practical – and it makes sense.
Michael Ruhlman is a prolific author, writing mostly about food. He does cookbooks, recipes, reviews, books, blogs, articles and more. He is always publishing, always getting prose out, and there is a good chance that you may have come across his work in a newspaper or magazine. It’s easy to understand why. Ruhlman writes as a friend, an informed colleague, and as the man next door (who loves to eat well).
Ruhlman’s recently published book, Grocery: The Buying and Selling of American Food, is a non-fiction account of the supermarket, written with a focus on a small family run chain, Heinen’s, in Cleveland. It is not a comprehensive account of the supermarket industry. Nor is it a business history, or what is all to common in the books about food, a polemic on what we should or should not be eating. Instead, Ruhlman is after information – about the store, they buying and selling of food, about his father, and about himself. To the extent that one can write a personal book about a grocery store, Ruhlman has done it. The book features some very interesting genre-crossing observations.
Ruhlman’s late father figures prominently. He loved to shop, to cook, and to feed people. Prominently among Ruhlman’s childhood memories are shopping with his father at Heinen’s, buying food for a week’s worth of meals, and large get togethers with family, friends and neighbors. The shopping trip represented family, prosperity, choice and optimism. Ruhlman senior was not alone in his love of the supermarket. We learn that for many, particularly of a certain generation, the boomers, fondness for grocery store trips and opulence is all too common.
Over the years, Ruhlman’s parents divorced, ending the shopping trips and the large meals. Ruhlman, too, is writing while experiencing a divorce and traumatic change. He grew up in Cleveland, but the book jacket notes that he now divides his time between New York City and Providence, Rhode Island. One does not have to be much of a detective to appreciate that this is a tangled book. Ruhlman’s interest in Heinen’s grocery is deeply tied to a host of memories, values and meaning. The knot of issues enhance, constrain and complicate the book.
The book is wide-ranging, moving from popular culture to what grocery store owners think and do, then back again. Ruhlman walks us around the supermarket, examining the differences in produce, dairy, delis and processed foods. There is a reason that milk is usually located at the back of a supermarket – and it’s more to do with a place for coolers than a marketing trick. The changes in how groceries operate and what they sell has been tremendous. More changes are anticipated, too. It’s a very complicated business with many moving parts and small profit margins.
The book concludes with the location of a Heinen’s in a restored downtown Cleveland building. It’s an expensive project. It also represents a new direction for the city and people’s expectation for shopping and food. Ruhlman is both elated by the new space and also saddened by loss.
Remember The Clash’s Lost in the Supermarket? Great track on one of the best albums of all time, London Calling, written all the way back in 1979. The song ran repeatedly through my head when reading Michael Ruhlman’s Grocery. Sometimes shopping is not really about shopping.
I’m all lost in the supermarket I can never shop happily I came in here for that special offer A guaranteed personality
On the recommendation of a bookstore staffer, I picked up Joshua Freeman’s Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World. I know – a book about factories? I was skeptical but she was persuasive. Turns out that she was right. It’s a surprisingly good read, presenting a host of historical changes in new light. Behemoth is well-written, accessible, and not dumb.
Freeman is a distinguished professor of history at Queens College, CUNY. He has serious history chops. His aim here, though, is not to overwhelm the reader with footnotes and in-the-weeds references and sourcing. The pace is swift, the prose is clear, and driving the book is a clear narrative tone that calls attention to something that many of us have missed: the importance of the big factory in the development of modern life. Freeman pulls from economics, anthropology, politics and history to explain the growth and key role the super-large factories have played.
Freeman begins with New England and the textile mills in the early 1800s, then moves to the large steel mills of the latter 1800s. Ford and the creation of the big automobile manufacturing facilities is next, and Freeman ties them elegantly to the mega-factories of the Soviet Union. He explores mass production and mass consumption, closing with a look at the massive factories in China and Vietnam. Foxconn City is an appropriate focus of attention and a good way to end the study.
Perhaps one of the most important takeaways from the book is a heightened appreciation of economic and technical change – particularly when it comes to making stuff. Material goods are central to the way that we live. How they come into being is fascinating on so many levels. Freeman does a fine job teasing out that question, providing historical answers across decades and borders.
Behemoth would be a fun book to teach, especially in an interdisciplinary course.
Working one’s way through Pat Barker’s novels is not work at all. But it also is neither easy nor comforting. Barker is an extraordinarily perceptive writer and the precision of her prose compels attention. She is beyond thoughtful; her attention is acute. I have come to realize that there is a clinical quality to her writing that is captivating – has me reading more and more – and also just a little bit scary. It is imposing.
Barker’s first big breakout novel was Union Street, a book that I had heard referenced years ago in discussions about “women’s literature.” While it features women, the categorization is inelegant at best. Union Street is much more, even with a relatively simple structure: seven interrelated chapters, each focusing on a different female character, all of whom live on the same street in a northern English city in the 1970s. The women are working class, poor, and range in age from early adolescence to aged and dying. The immediacy of their lives, struggles and circumstances impels the narrative, with the impositions on their lives dominating thoughts and actions. The plot does not move from conflict to resolution; the characters’ lives do not move from conflict to resolution. That’s also how people lead their lives, especially those of limited means. Life is often ongoing struggle.
Throughout, Barker gives the characters voice and agency, even if their language is rough and their agency severely constrained. It is powerful prose, carrying the reader into a world far removed from romance. It is also neither didactic or judgmental It is easy to see why the book, which came out in the early 1980s, generated so much attention. It remains relevant, an eye-opening read.
Published decades later, Barker’s Border Crossing is a frightening novel about the evil that children can do. Is it possible to become “good”? Does time served make a difference? And what might our responsibilities be to those who did something awful as a child? It is high gothic literature.
Set against the backdrop of a dissolving marriage, Tom and Lauren live in north of England. Trying for a child, they’ve grown farther apart or, perhaps, realized that they were never all that close. While on a walk, Tom rescues a young man who attempts suicide. The young man turns out to be a figure in Tom’s past. He is Danny, recently released from prison, who murdered an old woman as a child a decade earlier. Tom is a counselor and had testified about Danny. Tom and Danny start sessions, probing into issues of family, guilt, crime and identity.
Barker’s exploration of the characters is clinical. The dialogue is masterfully presented. In elegant prose, she lays bare the characters innermost feelings without reduction. Nor is the reader enlightened through gimmicks or third-person narration. Instead, the characters come across as complicated, high-functioning, and damaged people. Reading tells us much about them and about Barker, who is unremitting in her push for deeper understanding and truth. It’s high literature and a bit of a thriller, with uncomfortable tension throughout. Border Crossing isn’t diverting – it’s engrossing.
Who doesn’t enjoy a good satire of higher education? Colleges are easy to send up – or at least they used to be. When I remember Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim or Jane Smiley’s Moo, I think laughter, smiles and knowing glances. Recently reading Richard Russo’s novel Straight Man, though, has me in a different state of mind. It might be just that book, which I found to be decidedly unfunny. Or it might be something different. I may have changed or perhaps something broader has shifted in our thinking about college satire.
Russo is a successful author whose fiction has been well-received for decades. He writes for the television and movies, too, and has even won a Pulitzer. Russo’s novel Nobody’s Fool was made into an excellent movie with Paul Newman. It’s a favorite of mine. In 1997, Russo’s higher education comedy Straight Man was published. The reviews were consistently positive. Kirkus called it “gloriously funny” and the New York Times, New Yorker, and USA Today all liked it.
The book is first-person account from an English faculty member and acting department chair who is teaching at second or third tier college in Pennsylvania. Or more precisely, our narrator and faculty member is paid to teach but spends a ton of time on other issues while wrestling with a mid-life crisis. The protagonist, hero and anti-hero, William Henry Devereaux Jr., experiences a host of crises and dramas, flirtations and escapades, over a short period of time. Included in the escapades are campus politics (petty and serious), sex and flirting, sexual harassment, budget problems, student complaints, health complaints, family issues, drinking and drinking, and a whole lot more. Devereaux is a contrarian, a curmudgeon, a friend to some and also a really nasty colleague. He is difficult to everyone. We may be supposed to believe that he has a heart of gold, but chronicling his behavior makes it a difficulty claim to believe.
Entitled mediocrity best describes the environment in and around the fictional “West Central Pennsylvania University” of Straight Man. Mocking the characters’ pretensions would easier if they all were not so sad, so frustrated, and so deeply unhappy. The relatively disinterested university employer serves mostly as a foil. One could also argue that it is a facilitator and enabler to poor behavior across the board. Imagine over the top inappropriate actions, the kind that might show up on daytime reality television (Jerry Springer?), with faculty and staff as the stars.
Bracketing the strengths and weakness of this one particular book, I am starting to believe that the easy satirical pickings of higher education are now a thing of the past. We may have pretentious institutions and players, to be sure, but they are fewer and farther between. Decades of reduced funding, attacks from the left, right, above and below, and pressures to do more with less have rendered much of academia as toothless. Higher education may be generating a great deal of attention, but it is not setting the agenda or framing the conversation. As a consequence, it offers a fewer targets, and smaller ones at that, for lampooning.
Following a similar path, it is difficult today to make fun of the struggling student, burdened by debt, who hopes to do well and is not academically strong. Perhaps we can mock the entitled and pretentious. However, there are few of those students at smaller public universities. There is simply less humor to be squeezed out of these scenarios.
One could, I imagine, go super dark to make the situation funny. There have been funny novels that take place in all manner of awful situations, from wartime to future dystopias. They are different, though, than Straight Man. The book plays it straight. It’s tragic, not comedic. The book jacket extols Russo’s “high-wire walk between hilarity and heartbreak.” I think that he fell off on the side of unhappiness.
Frances Fitzgerald’s The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America is an outstanding work of history. A hefty 700 pages, the book is comprehensive without losing voice or focus. It’s a pleasure to read. It’s also the kind of work that should be read by many. Understanding the evangelical tradition in the United States is essential to deeper comprehension of American culture and politics.
Fitzgerald is a Pulitzer prize winning author and journalist. Her aim here is to give a comprehensive review of the evangelical movement from the First Great Awakening in colonial America through the present. The book’s focus, though, is on more recent events, from the 1970s to the present. It is a work of synthesis and integration. Fitzgerald has read the scholarship extensively. The Evangelicals has a learned feel to it but it is not pedantic.
Evangelicals are Protestants who believe that the Bible is the ultimate religious authority. They come from many traditions. Evangelicalism is an expansive term and it has changed over the years. Common to all evangelicals is enthusiastic preaching of the gospels. The origin of the term comes from Greek for “good news.”
The books is not just about religion. It explains the thread of the evangelical movement, and its leadership, with great awareness of the political environment. Fitzgerald’s focus give us a much better comprehension of what is, and who is, the Christian right. Perhaps the book’s greatest argument and takeaway is that regardless of the waxing and waning of the Christian right in the past fifty years, the movement’s underlying values – the spirit that animates it – were forged in the nineteenth century. Historical knowledge is essential.
The book, in fact, made me want to go back to the classroom to teach history. The evangelical tradition in American has been important for centuries. I have taught survey courses and reading The Evangelicals has highlighted to me just how important. The book offers and extremely helpful lens for understanding.
No ifs, ands or buts about it – Pat Barker is one of the best novelists around. A bit more than a decade ago I read her Regeneration trilogy, three novels taking place in World War I. It was gripping, amazing, and memorable. They gave me goosebumps. The books were well-read, well-reviewed, and received multiple awards. The last novel in the three, The Ghost Road, won the Booker Prize.
I don’t really know why, but I went for years without reading anything else by her. Barker kept writing, gathering up awards and putting out novels. When I came across a recent review praising yet another novel by her, I decided that it was high time to reacquaint myself with Barker. After a few more reads, my estimation of her has increased.
Barker wrote Double Vision in 2003. It’s a tightly written and yet wandering story with a hole at its middle: a character who was killed in the Middle East. His grieving wife and friend reconnect. No gimmicks in the plot. Instead, events unwind methodically as characters work to make sense of loss, life and meaning. There’s crime, passion, and a gothic feel to it – but without undue ornamentation.
In 2015 she published Noonday, the third novel in a trilogy that also stands on its own. It’s very good – no surprises there – and it deals in a very mature way with trauma, memory, and how people navigate through “history.” Again, at the center of the novel are few well developed characters who interact with each other, trying to figure out relationships, commitment and and meaning. Set during the WWII Blitz, violence defines the environment.
Both novels are sure of themselves and where they are going. Reading them provoked me into thinking through why Barker is so good, why her writing is so powerful. One answer rests on her intelligence. Her observations, her plotting, her language – it’s impossible to read Barker and not be aware that someone incredibly smart and talented has put it together. Even with her relatively straightforward language, I am aware of great wisdom, coupled with curiosity, moving the story along.
Barker shuns the unnecessary . Sentences and paragraphs, ideas and story, are clear and unencumbered. Her words are precise. She does not dumb things down, either, when parsing. It was good to reach for a dictionary when I came across “lordotic.” It’s the curve above your butt and in the paragraph, it fit perfectly.
Themes in Barker’s books are often unsettling. She writes about violence, trauma, and how people manage through it. She is generous with her characters while unsparing in her insights. I feel as though I have learned when I read her – though I never get the sense that she is didactic. There is little frivolity in her novels.
Bottom line – Barker’s writing is mature. It is literature, not fiction, from a grown up for grown ups. And when I’m ready for that, and not distraction, it makes for a very welcome read.
Thank you, Pat Barker, and please keep the prose coming.
