Good Books Archives - Read. Think. Act.

Rabbit: The Autobiography of Ms. Pat

(Oct. 2017) When folks think about the problems of growing up in the hood, they think about what it must feel like to be poor, or hungry, or to have your lights cut off. The struggle nobody talk about is what it feel like to be invisible, or to know it in your heart nobody cares. Mama didn’t want to be famous, she wanted to be seen.

That realization came to Patricia Williams as she began her career as a comedian in Indianapolis in 2010. This audiobook, read by the author, is remarkable on so many levels. Her nickname Rabbit was given to her as a child. The name she uses professionally, Ms. Pat, is what her children’s friends called her. She spent much of her life thinking she had nothing in common with her alcoholic mother who died at 39. Then she realized when she went on stage to do stand up comedy that she also craved to be seen, acknowledged and heard.

She gives her listeners/readers an unvarnished truth about her life that few of us could imagine – growing up in abject poverty with a mother who taught her to roll drunks in her grandfather’s “liquor house” when she was 7. She and her sister Sweetie were molested as children by a friend of their mother’s, and both sisters ended up pregnant as teenagers. Rabbit had her first child at 13 and another at 14. She dropped out of middle school to raise her kids, discovering she could support them pretty well by selling crack – the drug that held Atlanta’s poor neighborhoods in its grip in the 1990’s.

Rabbit did a stint in jail for drug possession with intent to distribute. It meant her two young children were left in the care of their daddy Derrick’s family. Her daughter started her first day of kindergarten while she was in jail. When she got out, she went back to selling drugs – a risky employment but one that supported her kids and allowed her to also help her mother out. It also got her shot at one point.

Along the way, she meets people who help her navigate her teenage years and early 20s. A turning point was finally cutting Derrick loose, which made it possible for her to meet Michael. This man helped her to raise her two children, as well as her sister’s four children for 10 years while Sweetie was in and out of rehab. Then they had two children of their own. It was Michael’s job transfer from Atlanta that put them into the mostly white suburbs of Indianapolis, Indiana.

Doing comedy was not something Rabbit had thought about, but she walks us through all of her failed attempts to get a “regular” job, which was nearly impossible because of her felony record that turned up in background checks. She had gotten her GED, invested money in vocational training, and THEN discovered she would likely never be hired to work in the field for which she had received a certification.

Her first foray into comedy was simply standing up at open mic nights at a local club and telling stories about her life in the hood. She quickly discovered that “it turns out comedy and selling drugs have a lot in common. You have to be quick, work hard and give people what they want.” She also discovered something else from the people who came up to talk to her after her performances.

All those times mama told me white folks were better than me, had me thinkin’ white people all live the easy life. But that woman isn’t the only one who has come up to me after a show to tell me about her shitty childhood, or her drug addicted parents. I was a grown woman before I found out black folks aren’t the only ones who had hard times. Everybody got a struggle. Nobody get through this life easy.

She started opening for another comic at clubs that had a largely black audience. As she honed her material, other comedians started to give her opportunities to work with them as well, and then her big break came when she was asked by Marc Maron to be a guest on his WTF podcast. She’s now been a guest on a number of his podcasts and that has led to bookings at clubs around the country.

While I’m sure the printed book is wonderful, I wouldn’t trade the experience of this woman telling me her story for anything. It’s a remarkable journey of resilience with a happy ending. While her early life is far from unique, in fact it’s all too common in many poor communities, her ability to find her way forward out of all of that is a true odyssey, well told.

You can follow Patricia Williams and where she is appearing on Twitter @ComedienneMsPat

by Catherine Read Leave a Comment

The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class

(Sept. 2017) The aspirational class members make decisions and establish norms that have far more pernicious outcomes for society than did previous leisure-class consumerism. Rather than buying silver spoons and going on long holidays, their investments in education, health, retirement, and parenting ensure the reproduction of status (and often wealth too) for their offspring in a way that no material good can. Through this reproduction of cultural capital and its trappings we see the emergence of what Charles Murray has called the “New Upper Class” and “New Lower Class,” which is not simply an economic divide, but is also a deep cultural divide that has never existed with such distinction as it does today.

I see an emerging body of work from various sources that have common threads running through them pointing to this same conclusion. J.D. Vance, in his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, describes his dawning realization that the other students around him at Yale Law School knew things about how the world worked that he had no idea about. The world in which those other students lived might be located in the United States, but it was a world way from where Vance grew up in the economically depressed Middletown, Ohio.

The author, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, is a social scientist who has taken a great deal of research, data and anecdotal information and weaved it into a highly readable book meant for the general public. I applaud both the rigorous academic research necessary to formulate credible theories and also the academic who can then take that information and make it digestible for non-academic consumption. In order to talk about the bigger issues, we all have to understand the concepts and have a shared vocabulary to do so.

The book begins with the well known research and writing of Thorstein Veblen around the “conspicuous consumption” of the “leisure class.” She then walks us through the evolution of mass production and the democratization of consumer purchasing that removed the status symbols and brands that formerly marked the elite. What has replaced it is “inconspicuous consumption” among those with economic means to have more choices.

Conspicuous consumption among the rich has been replaced by “inconspicuous consumption”—spending on nonvisible, highly expensive goods and services that give people more time and, in the long term, shape life chances. These include education, health care, child care, and labor-intensive services like nannies, gardeners, and housekeepers.

I found the examination of breast-feeding to be particularly illuminating. That particular topic fits within the larger scope of “intensive mothering,” which is also part of this “inconspicuous consumption” that I have seen evolve in my lifetime. Without mandated paid leave benefits in this country for new mothers, women in better paying professional careers with companies that voluntarily provide those benefits have options in their parenting choices that other women simply don’t have.

As the journalist Hannah Rosen calculates, “Let’s say a baby feeds seven times a day and then a couple more times at night. That’s nine times for about a half hour each, which adds up to more than half of a working day, every day, for at least six months. This is why, when people say that breast-feeding is ‘free,’ I want to hit them with a two-by-four. It’s only free if a woman’s time is worth nothing.

Those with the economic means to have choices, are choosing to invest in the future of their children. That leaves behind those families without the economic means to have choices, and creates this widening gap of cultural differences that carry over from one generation to the next.

Having economic means to make a wider range of choices has also given rise to what Currid-Halkett terms “conspicuous production.” From organic vegetables at farmers markets, to the artisanal farm to cup production of Intelligentsia Coffee, cultural capital is created in the choices we make. Where Starbucks made its fortune in bringing luxury to the masses, Intelligentsia makes its (smaller) fortune proclaiming its rarity. What drives the economic model in paying more for a product or service is how that feeds our personal narrative about who we are, what our priorities are, and how we see the world. Consumers’ desire for these less ostentatious forms of consumption is crucial to conspicuous production’s success.

There are themes in this book that intersect with those of Dream Hoarders by Brookings Senior Fellow Richard V. Reeves. That’s why I see this emerging body of work around cultural and economic issues as providing various threads that woven together give us a clearer picture of where we are and potentially where we are headed. There was even a reference in this book to The Primates of Park Avenue, which also looks at many of these same issues from a very different narrative perspective. Awareness is the first step in having a productive discussion about wealth gaps, education gaps, the lack of true social mobility and what seems to be the shrinking of America’s middle class.

This book is a good read. It will likely make you more self aware about your own lifestyle choices, along with heightening your awareness about the choices of those around you. It’s a fascinating look at the times we are living in.

by Catherine Read Leave a Comment

Braving the Wilderness – Brené Brown

(Sept. 2017) True belonging doesn’t require that you change who you are. It requires you to be who you are.

This is another amazing book by Dr. Brené Brown, who previously wrote The Gifts of Imperfection, Daring Greatly, and Rising Strong.” She talks about writing this book against the backdrop of polarizing political and ideological chaos. In looking at some other reviews of this book, I am not surprised that there are people who are dismissive of the book based on their beloved writer having the audacity to “be political.” Which ironically is a wonderful illustration of the points this book sets out to make about true belonging and braving the wilderness.

Dr. Brown defines belonging as “an innate desire to be a part of something larger than us.” She goes on to say that our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self acceptance, and that being ourselves sometimes means standing alone.

Fitting in is not the same as belonging – in fact it can often be a barrier to it. One of the most poignant parts of the book is when she quotes groups of middle school students who came up with their own distinctions between these two concepts:

“Belonging is being somewhere you want to be, and they want you. Fitting in is being somewhere you want to be, but they don’t care one way or the other.”

“Belonging is being accepted for you. Fitting in is being accepted for being like everyone else.”

“If I get to be me, I belong. If I have to be like you, I fit in.”

She also goes on to talk about how some of these students share a sense of not belonging at home, how they feel like they aren’t living up to their parents’ expectations. Dr. Brown had her own experience of feeling disconnected from her family and points out that “not belonging in our families is still one of the most dangerous hurts. That’s because it has the power to break our heart, our spirit and our sense of self worth.”

She talks about four elements of true belonging and how the daily practice of these things can feel like a paradox. But a paradox is not inherently a bad thing. It requires us to consider two things simultaneously that may seem to be in conflict, or impossible to do at the same time. Her four elements:

People are hard to hate close-up. Move in.
Speak truth to bullshit. Be civil.
Hold hands. With strangers.
Strong back, soft front, wild heart.

She spends some time talking about bullshit as being a greater enemy of truth than even lies are. “Lying is a defiance of the truth. Bullshitting is a wholesale dismissal of the truth.”

She also uses BRAVING as an outline for what it takes in order to trust others. And also to engage in self trust.

B – Boundaries
R – Reliability
A – Accountability
V – Vault (keeping confidences and not speaking out of turn)
I – Integrity
N – Non-judgement (ask for what you need and accept what others need without judging them)
G – Generosity (not jumping to negative assumptions about the intention of others)

I admit that I am a fan of Dr. Brené Brown and love her other books. I’m just as enthusiastic about this one and think the subject is very timely. There are going to be people who don’t like some of her positions and perspectives because it does not align with their beliefs. She talks about Black Lives Matter and why All Lives Matter is not the same. She explains it’s not the same “because the humanity was not stripped from all lives the way it was from the lives of black citizens.” That you can’t undo that level of dehumanization in one or two generations. She goes on to say that it’s possible to care about the lives of police officers and the lives of black citizens and we should not be drawn into false dichotomies of either/or that seek “to shame us for not hating the right people.”

I am passionate in my belief that you can’t simply “opt out” of politics as if it’s something that doesn’t touch you. It touches everyone – it’s the foundation of how public policy is made and that creates the quality of life we have – for better or for worse. Abdicating interest, knowledge and participation in politics gives all your power to someone else – whose intentions and goals may not align with yours. In a democracy, everyone needs to be an informed participant.

I highly recommend this book. It provides excellent food for thought and some very practical suggestions for how to find belonging, even when that means standing alone.

by Catherine Read 2 Comments

Ghost of the Innocent Man – Benjamin Rachlin

(Sept. 2017) What a remarkable book. The entire gripping story is gleaned from 25 years worth of notes, transcripts, forms, files, interviews and testimony. No one’s name has been changed because it’s all a matter of public record. If transparency is what you want, then this style of non-fiction investigative journalism will deliver that on every page.

The book starts off telling two stories: The conviction of Willie James Grimes in 1989 for a rape in Hickory, NC; and the formation of North Carolina’s Innocence Inquiry Commission (NCIIC) which is the first and ONLY commission of its kind in the entire United States. In ten years, the NCIIC has exonerated 10 wrongly convicted inmates.

The chapters alternate between the two stories, which converge when inmate Willie Grimes eventually connects with Christine Mumma, who was the driving force behind the formation of the NCIIC. As a young lawyer fresh out of law school clerking for the Chief Justice of North Carolina’s Supreme Court, I. Beverly Lake, Christine began flagging cases that looked like wrongful convictions. She was frustrated by the fact that appeals are only matters of procedural considerations and NOT about actual innocence. She convinces this conservative Judge to work with the liberal academics of North Carolina’s Innocence Project to form a working group that eventual swelled to 30 members from DA offices, sheriff’s departments, police departments, defense attorneys and even members of a victims rights group. It was rocky, contentious, messy and hard. That group was the genesis of The North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence, where Mumma remains its Executive Director.

The story of the birth of the NCIIC is every bit as gripping and frustrating as the wrongful conviction of Willie James Grimes. We know from the beginning of the book that he is innocent of this crime of rape which happened in Hickory, NC, in 1988. This was at a time when DNA testing was in its infancy and not used as a primary tool in crime investigations. Willie Grimes is convicted based on the testimony of the 69 year old victim and the testimony of a specialist in hair identification – which would later be totally discredited as a reliable tool for identifying perpetrators.

The author, Benjamin Rachlin, walks us through incompetencies at every level – in excruciating detail – from the initial investigation of the crime, to Willie’s many moves among multiple prisons for no apparent reason, to psychiatric reports that are breathtaking in their presumptions, misinformation and misdiagnosis.

The inhumanity of the criminal justice system screams from every page. And the author is simply relaying the information contained in volumes of reports about every tiny aspect of Willie’s life inside the North Carolina prison system. It’s also a walk through 25 years of pharmacology in the U.S. This man entered prison taking no medications whatsoever, and the list of prescription medications and the amounts he was given in the almost 25 years he was a prison is mind boggling. The fact that he had advanced prostate cancer that was overlooked despite constant medical supervision is just one of a long list of incompetencies that plagued this man’s life.

This book is simultaneously infuriating and frustrating and also incredibly inspiring. What happened to Willie Grimes is not some rare case. Far from it. As of March 2017, there have been over 2,000 exonerations in the U.S. – at least one in every state. And that is the tip of the iceberg. Keep in mind that the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission has no counterpart in any other state. There are Innocence Projects scattered across the country doing what work they can, and there are some Conviction Integrity Offices working under District Attorneys in various cities and counties. But the North Carolina Legislature formed this commission and FUNDED this commission and gave them legal authority to decide if a convicted defendant is actually innocent.

The protagonists in this book are Willie J. Grimes and Christine Mumma. Where their stories converge is the heart of this book. The NCIIC decided to investigate his case – a fascinating look at how they conducted that investigation – and then made their case to the 8 member commission which voted unanimously to send it to a 3 judge panel. After living every minute with Willie in prison, and watching the machinations of Christine to invent something that had never been done before, I think I held my breath through the last chapters of the book.

This book is so real. The writing is excellent. Benjamin Rachlin masterfully weaves all this “information” into a compelling story. And he’s not in it. That is the other remarkable aspect of this book – the absence of the writer’s presence. That is a talent not to be overlooked. I’m not sure a lesser writer could have turned 24 years of prison reports into a page turner of a book. This author did that.

I love this book. It makes me crazy to think that we have allowed this to go on. It makes me crazy to think that after a decade of showing the effectiveness of this kind of commission that NO OTHER STATE has followed North Carolina. Why? Do we really not care enough about the integrity of our system of justice to warrant replicating a proven model that has saved the wrongly convicted from death row and life sentences? WTF?

Read this book and then get really really mad. Get up on your high horse and take a wild ride to your state capitol and advocate for your legislature to DO THIS THING!

by Catherine Read Leave a Comment

Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women

(Sept 2017) This book is extraordinary – as is the woman who wrote it. One of the great strengths of the book is how it weaves staggering facts and statistics about mass incarceration into Susan Burton’s deeply personal story. Each chapter begins with facts about different aspects of our criminal justice system, and the sprawling prison-industrial-complex, that are impacting generations of American families.

Sixty-five million Americans with a criminal record face a total of 45,000 collateral consequences that restrict everything from employment, professional licensing, child custody rights, housing, student aid, voting and even the ability to visit an incarcerated loved one. Many of these restrictions are permanent, forever preventing those who’ve already served their time from reaching their potential in the workforce, as parents, and as productive citizens.

“The result is that these collateral consequences become a life sentence harsher than whatever sentence a court actually imposed upon conviction.” American Bar Association president William C. Hubbard

While factual information like that sets up the framework for each chapter of this book, it is Susan’s narrative that breathes life into what this means for the people who are caught up in this revolving door of poverty, trauma and incarceration.

Knowing that 90% of incarcerated women have suffered some form of sexual abuse or physical violence isn’t the same as hearing what that means when it is described from the point of view of a 3 year old, a ten year and a 14 year old rape victim now a mother. This is how Susan Burton’s life began. A teenaged prostitute, she was befriended by a bail bondsman name George who would be with her for 30 years – encouraging her to be the person he knew she could be. He was there from the lowest points of her life – working the streets, drug addiction, losing her son to a police van hitting him in the streets, forgery and theft to feed her drug habit – to the point at which she decided to get sober, get clean and start over. When she was named a Top Ten CNN Hero in 2010, she called him out by name at the awards event.

In 2012, she was named Encore’s Purpose Prize winner. In 2014, she received the James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award, and in 2015 the Los Angeles Times named her one of the nation’s 18 New Civil Rights Leaders.

Susan’s journey is remarkable for her ability to re-invent her life as an “ex-con” at the age of 46. It was a series of happenstance and circumstance that created opportunities for her to finally divert into a drug rehab program instead of back to prison. When she finally found the program CLARE in Santa Monica that got her into AA’s 12 Step Program, she was on her way to a new life.

There were many remarkable people that helped her along the journey to what would become “A New Way of Life,” a re-entry program for formerly incarcerated women in the Watts area of Los Angeles. This part of the book resonates with me because of my work with a re-entry program for women here in Alexandria, Virginia, called Friends of Guest House. Susan forged ahead with her vision of providing other women the help they needed to start their lives over after stepping off the prison bus. She did it herself, and she was determined to do it for others.

The impact of our broken criminal justice system on generations of families is a cycle that seems to have no end. The poverty, the trauma, the lack of educational and economic opportunities, is just compounded when millions of people are saddled with a lifetime of restrictions because of a criminal record. The impact on our country cannot be overstated – it’s tearing at the fabric of our culture and our economy. Something must be done and it will only be done when more people are motivated by the injustice of our criminal justice system.

I would highly recommend this book to every reader, and it would be a particularly excellent book club choice. These are issues more people need to be talking about. Individually, we can be the voice advocating for change, and together we can move the needle on taking back our country from a broken system of justice that feeds mass incarceration and dooms future generations.

by Catherine Read Leave a Comment

The Hate U Give – Angie Thomas

(Sept 2017) Pac said Thug Life stood for “The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody. T-H-U-G-L-I-F-E. Meaning what society gives us as youth, it bites them in the ass when we wild out. Get it? Khalil explains this to Starr as they are riding in his car. A short time later they are pulled over by a cop, and Khalil becomes a statistic – another unarmed black American gunned down by a cop.

This book spoke to my heart. The characters, the families, the relationships – had such a ring of authenticity to them. It’s hard to imagine that Starr and her family and friends don’t actually exist out there somewhere. Or perhaps they actually do exist and author Angie Thomas brought them to the pages of this book so those of us who do not inhabit their world would know them more intimately.

This book is categorized as “Young Adult” fiction, but it should be read by everyone over the age of 12. When I read books like this I wonder why these timely and relevant works have not replaced some of the dated and less relevant books being taught in classrooms everywhere. Literature does in fact influence culture and perspective. It’s time we were more selective about choosing books that are both great works of literature and compelling in their own right to the young people reading them.

I’ve read that the author was inspired by the music of Tupac Shakur – which factors into the book in a beautiful way – as well as by the Black Lives Matter movement. This book takes us inside communities most of us will never see. It gives a vividly constructed backstory to the newspaper headlines we see on a regular basis proclaiming that yet another unarmed African-American has been killed by police. We have come to expect exactly how it will play out – an investigation, a hearing, possibly a trial, and at the end no cop will be charged.

I highly recommend this book. I loved every minute I spent with these characters. Their lives are real and it’s the realness of their situation that makes you hold your breath and fear what will come next. We should feel the same way about the real people in this country that we feel about the characters in this book. We need to care more and we need to do more to protect the lives of black people in our communities.

by Catherine Read Leave a Comment

Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience and Finding Joy

(Aug 2017) This book weaves together one woman’s personal journey through loss and grief with compelling research about how we cultivate resiliency and can actually experience growth following great tragedy.

Option B is every bit as good as I expected it would be. I read Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In, and I’ve read Adam Grant’s books Give and Take and Originals. I would highly recommend them all. These two authors, who are also friends, have put together a very readable book that plumbs the depth of human loss in the most personal of ways. Sandberg has bared the raw emotions of losing her husband unexpectedly and finding her way forward through the fog of grief to reshape her life as a single parent of two young children.

The book is much broader than just her personal experience, but her journey is the common thread that connects excellent research on resiliency and perseverance together with other people’s experiences and stories about overcoming adversity. The book is told from Sandberg’s perspective, but it is very much a collaborative effort.

There is great practical perspective in the concepts they put forward here. One that really resonated with me is how we are held back by “the three P’s” – Personalizing, Permanence and Pervasiveness. These things stand in the way of a “growth mindset” and become a hurdle to resilience. When we personalize things that happen to us as something specific to us, when we believe that we can’t change how we think or feel, and that this terrible thing that has happened affects everything else in our lives – that stops us from believing we can move forward.

Resilience is the foundation of happiness. We can’t control many of the things that happen to us in the course of our lifetime, so we need to get better at how we respond to what happens to us. I think this book is a great primer on how to strengthen our resiliency muscle. I would highly recommend it.

by Catherine Read Leave a Comment

Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship

Reading with Patrick (Aug 2017) Maybe a record of someone’s private thoughts is worthless anywhere. Certainly in jail — contraband is worth more. But I wondered if it was especially worthless in the Delta, where a calm place to read was hard to come by; where there wasn’t a bookstore for a hundred miles and families couldn’t afford a book, anyhow; and where a teacher once burst into my classroom to scold me for having the kids write about the death of a classmate, not wanting them to feel sympathy for him.

I love this book so much. As Patrick would say, “It’s real.”

Michelle Kuo has gifted to this world such an extraordinary testimony — both hers and Patrick Browning’s.

It’s a beautiful literary work that is full of thought and introspection. It is a meditation on the great questions of the human experience and how books and writing and poetry impact how we see our world.

All that beauty is wrapped around the gritty reality of rural poverty, racism, history denied, mass incarceration, failed education policies, despair, addiction and violence. And yet – there is also faith, family, resilience and love.

This story of how a daughter of Taiwanese immigrant parents, born and raised in Michigan and educated at Harvard, ended up in the Mississippi Delta teaching at an alternative school, has more plot twists than you can imagine. Only this is no work of fiction. It’s an extraordinary personal journey.

I feel inadequate to the task of reviewing this book. There is not a “genre” for this kind of non-fiction literature. It weaves the well researched history of racism and poverty in rural Helena, Arkansas, together with the writings of Leo Tolstoy, C.S. Lewis, James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass and the poetry of Yeats, Tennyson, Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Ms. Kuo and Patrick explore Haiku together day after day in a jail visitors room. She has him write letters – to his daughter and to the man he killed. Those things may seem to be incongruous on their face, but it’s about the transformative power of words, ideas and the experience of those before us to help us see who we are.

“Bad conditions could impel one to leave, but they could also sap one’s strength to go.” I found so much in these pages that resonated. I felt the struggle of the place, of the people, and the determination of this teacher to help Patrick to find in himself the things he could not see.

I highly recommend this book to every reader as it a story deeply rooted in the power of education to change lives.

by Catherine Read Leave a Comment

American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land – Monica Hesse

(Aug 2017) So much of life is intangible, and places don’t feel like they’re disappearing to the people who are living there.

This review is an ode to independent bookstores, journalists who write books, rainy vacation days and to Virginia.

My husband Tom and I like to come back to Chincoteague Island as often as we can. We eloped here in July of 2011 and we continue to come back because it is a peaceful place that speaks to us. We both grew up in small rural communities – Tom in NW Georgia and me in SW Virginia. There is something about the timelessness of this place that author Monica Hesse captures in this book about Accomack County on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.

I likely would not have encountered this book except I am drawn to independent bookstores like a moth to a flame. Sundial Books on the Main Street of Chincoteague Island was featuring this book on a display that faced the front door. Perhaps it’s the cover photo that is vaguely reminiscent of the cover of Hillbilly Elegy that drew me to the book. The well written synopsis on the inside of the dust jacket and knowing it was written by a journalist with The Washington Post made it a “must have” a minute after I picked it up.

The reason I don’t mind rainy days on vacation is because they are meant for reading. In fact, I love a rainy vacation day because I rarely ever have the luxury of reading a book from start to finish in a single day. And here I was, sitting in Accomack County reading a book about the arson that gripped this rural community for five and a half months in 2012 and 2013. Over eighty-five fires, multiple fires a night, that stretched the capacity of the all volunteer fire departments to cover a rural county where they identified 1,400 abandoned buildings that were all possible targets.

I couldn’t put this book down. Monica Hesse did such wonderful research on every aspect of this story. The history of Accomack County is one I did not know, despite being a native Virginian whose own ancestors go back to the 1600s – just like many families who are central to this story. Many of us know our own stories and the stories of where we come from, but learning about the other histories of Virginia is endlessly fascinating to me. Beth Macy, a journalist with The Roanoke Times made the story of the furniture industry in southern Virginia equally captivating in her book Factory Man. I hope this is a trend that continues among journalists who see the potential for a good story to become a book of real substance.

There is a true art to writing non-fiction that reads like a novel. American Fire is well written and the structure of the story is what keeps you turning the pages to find out more. It’s about so much more than the story of the arsons and the arsonists. It’s about a way of life that most of us cannot relate to. I loved the designations of Born Heres, Come Heres and Been Heres. I get that. Her specificity of this being a “close knit community” rather than a “small community” is also important to the story because the county is large but sparsely populated.

One hundred years ago, Accomack County was the richest rural county in the nation. The railroad and potato farming created wealth and jobs for the people who lived here. The advent of the automobile was the beginning of the end of that boom time. Now chicken farming is the main industry here with Perdue and Tysons being the major employers here in the county. The population is aging and young people leave to find better opportunities on the mainland. This is the economic story of towns and counties all over America who have seen the rise and decline of industries that built and sustained communities but can sustain them no longer.

I highly recommend this book. Hesse draws you into the stories of people in a singular moment in their county’s history. While the main protagonists of this book are the arsonists, the other people central to this story are authentically drawn as well. Her research is meticulous and thorough, her end notes generous to all those who made this book possible. She is a good storyteller and this story was crying out to be told.

by Catherine Read Leave a Comment

Dream Hoarders by Richard V. Reeves

This is a truly important book. Progressive politics has supported the idea of the 1% vs the 99% and that has unburdened affluent liberal thinkers from taking responsibility as part of the top 20%. There are opportunities and advantages that accrue to those in the top quintile that we are reluctant to give up – everything from the 529 savings accounts for our children’s education, to how our neighborhoods are zoned, legacy admissions to Ivy League universities and the home mortgage interest tax credit.

I was fortunate to hear Richard Reeves talk about this book at the Aspen Institute last week in DC. He makes a convincing case for how this country, so proud of it’s founding upon the ideals of social mobility and meritocracy, is becoming more rigidly stratified into classes. As a native of the United Kingdom who is now an American citizen, a resident of Montgomery County, Maryland, and a senior fellow in Economics at the Brookings Institution, he brings an unusual combination of perspectives to this study.

He’s draws on the research of other scholars to make his case, as well as from Robert Putnam’s Our Kids, J.D. Vance’s Hillybilly Elegy, and Charles Murray’s Coming Apart. From both a data standpoint and anecdotal examples, Reeves paints a picture of our country that not everyone is willing to see.

Over the last three or four decades, income inequality has increased in the United States, but only at the top. There has been no increase in inequality in the bottom 80 percent of the population. The break point is around the eightieth percentile, as David Grusky confirmed in a recent comprehensive study. “The income gap between professional-managerial class and all other classes is now very large,” Grusky concludes, “whereas the income gaps among the remaining classes are not much different from what prevailed in 1979.”

The whole concept of “hoarding opportunities” is about the cumulative effect it has not only on income but the other factors that feed into a class based system – where we went to college, what kind of employment we have and what neighborhoods we live in.

Reeves hits one of my pet peeves very hard throughout the book – internships. How they are distributed, who gets them, the fact that most are unpaid (and largely unregulated in any way) and why increasingly they are more important to better career opportunities. The chart on page 117 show internships ranked first by a survey of employers, ahead of seven other factors such as college reputation, GPA, volunteer experience and employment during college. In other words, it’s become a prerequisite to the better jobs while the distribution of those internships are vastly inequitable. One of the most telling examples in the book is how NYC Mayors Bloomberg and de Blasio sought waivers from the city’s Conflict of Interest Board in order to hire their own children as summer interns. So much for high minded liberal ideals of economic opportunity.

Throughout the book there is an emphasis on educational inequality, inherited wealth and class, how residential zoning factors into who is in the local public schools and also about the gaps in the quality of parenting.

One of the most surprising subjects in the book, and one I fully support, is his proposal in Chapter 7 Sharing the Dream around “Reduce Unintended Pregnancies Through Better Contraception.” Finally, a recognition about how unintended pregnancies affect both the parent and the child and place them both at a disadvantage for economic stability and social mobility. He talks about how our antiquated system of sex education and access to reliable contraception almost ensures that we will continue to have an entire class of economically disadvantaged Americans made up of single parent households with children.

While I applaud his research on LARCs and an honest discussion about unintended pregnancies, I will ding Richard Reeves for not saying one single word about abortion. Talk about placation politics. As a senior fellow at the venerated Brookings Institution and a researcher who wants to influence public policy, I can see why he would avoid discussing something summarily dismissed by every conservative he’s trying to persuade to his larger vision.

However, American women have a legal right to access abortion services in this country as decided by the Supreme Court of the United States in Roe v. Wade in 1972. Ever since that decision, conservative forces have systematically tried to dismantle access to those legally protected services in states across the country. EVERY SINGLE DAY there are headlines about challenges to the shut down women’s abortion clinics from Kentucky to Louisiana, Mississippi to Arkansas, Texas to Virginia. To simply ignore that as a contributing factor to the economic forces he so thoroughly examines in this book is a glaring weakness. Preventing unintended pregnancies is a laudable goal. Legislatures dictating whether women will bear the children of those unintended pregnancies is a reality he does not address. Clearly women of the upper middle class can buy abortion services no matter where they live. It’s only poor women who suffer from the lack of access to services. Talk about hoarding of opportunities!

I would highly recommend this book. Particularly to my fellow travelers in the top economic quintile of Americans. I’ve seen the enemy and it is US. The first step to solving a problem is recognizing it, naming it and owning our responsibility for it.