Dimestore by Lee Smith

I am in the midst of reading and enjoying Dimestore: A Writer’s Life by Lee Smith who has done an amazing job of conveying a sense of time and place, almost as if the soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou? were playing in the background.  Dimestore tells the story of growing up, of observing the townspeople in Grundy, Virginia, and of becoming a writer. It’s a reflective book and caused me to think of my own grandparents and the rural life they led in small town America.  Early on, Smith quotes Eudora Welty from One Writer's Beginnings:

“Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever really lost.”

I remember as a teenager reading Christy by Catherine Marshall which is set in the Smoky Mountains and I look forward to picking up Lee Smith’s Fair and Tender Ladies for its tales of Appalachia. Other past favorites to look for include Sharon McCrumb’s Ballad Novels and Adrian Trigiani’s Big Stone Gap. These books generally tell of hardship and simpler times, but they also talk of family.  As award winning author Lee Smith notes in Dimestore, “Appalachian people are more rooted than other Southerners. We still live in big, extended families that spoil children and revere old people. We will talk your ears off. We still excel in storytelling.” You can enjoy the storytelling yourself -- read an excerpt of the memoir Dimestore (which received a starred review from Library Journal) on the author’s website.

What Everyone Needs to Know from Oxford University Press

I have only recently discovered the series “What Everyone Needs to Know” from Oxford University Press. That was mostly due to a project which students were completing on the Arab Spring, ISIS, and Taliban.  Students found our copy of The Arab Uprisings to be so useful that I ordered a second one and started to investigate some other titles in the series.  Each is written by a leading authority in the field and is presented in a question-and-answer format which, when combined with a detailed index, is very helpful for our high school students.

I have now previewed Drones (March 2016) since I have a number of students investigating that subject.  There was a fairly large section on the history of drone development and another on their relationship to sci-fi speculation, but I could not easily find comments related to the moral impact of the use of drones as unmanned weapons.  Also, the author, an Associate Professor at Cornell University, made a reference to possible future registration which should be updated since it seems the FAA did begin to require that last year. I was happily surprised to see emphasis and a set of questions related to civilian and commercial use of drones and conjecture regarding their future miniaturization. 

In addition, I also looked through China’s Economy (April 2016) which was written by a Senior Fellow at Brookings-Tsinghua Center who has lived in Beijing since 2002. That one, in particular, seemed to have an extremely helpful “further reading” section and an extensive set of footnotes which would allow students to investigate context and/or more in-depth knowledge on their own. I will continue to watch this series since upcoming titles reflect topics about which students have recently shown interest, including Artificial Intelligence, Campaign Finance, and Cuba. 

Poverty and Discrimination in the Midwest

I am reading two new non-fiction books which deal with poverty and racism: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond (Mar. 1, Crown; 432 pages) and The South Side by Natalie Y. Moore (Mar. 22, St. Martin’s Press; 272 pages).  Both of these books offer excellent, if disturbing and often surprising, looks at housing, poverty, and racism in two Midwestern cities.

Moore (a journalist for Chicago’s NPR station, WBEZ) begins The South Side by sharing statistics related to the city’s overall diversity (7^th best out of 100 most populous US cities) and the segregation amongst its neighborhoods (a diversity index that ranks 82^nd out of 100). She recounts her family’s own experiences in Chicago enclaves like Chatham and Beverly and also tells the story of how playwright Lorraine Hansberry’s family was forced to move. After quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., “as long as there is residential segregation, there will be de facto segregation in every area of life,” Moore broadens her argument to encompass the prevalence of violence (in a chapter titled “We are not Chiraq”), local politics (“Searching for Harold”), and comments on recent events like Sandra Bland’s death. Highly readable and engaging, The South Side received a starred review from Kirkus.  I agree and know that teachers and students will be very interested in the personal stories and interwoven facts that Moore shares about an area that is local and yet far removed from their daily experiences. 

So, too, are some of the scenes described in Desmond’s Evicted.  The Milwaukee I know is full of beer houses and restaurants, shopping, music, gardens, and a zoo. Instead, Desmond follows eight families and relates their attempts to find housing in Milwaukee in 2008 and 2009. I was moved by his accounts of the individuals involved and by statistics such as “in a typical year, almost 1 in 5 poor renting families nationwide missed payments and received a disconnection notice from their utility company.” Overall, Evicted is a powerful and sobering read written by a MacArthur “Genius” and Harvard sociologist, Matthew Desmond who points out how evictions disproportionately impact women and children.  Each year, New Trier students have a tradition of building a house through Habitat for Humanity; we should be encouraging advisors to share and discuss excerpts from this book. Recommended by editors at both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, Evicted also received starred reviews from Booklist, Kirkus, Library Journal and Publishers Weekly.