1. Read Michelle Alexander’s NY Times piece about talking to her son about Ferguson.
2. Cry.
3. Read Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow, which describes how the U.S. criminal justice system’s mass incarceration Exerts social control over black men. It’s provocative an excellent, but I’ll let the book speak for itself with excerpts below.
4. Rage.
5. Figure out what you can do to promote social justice.
Before the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa, before anti-tobacco campaigns and Just Say No, before vaccinations and immunizations, and before anyone knew what germs were, there was John Snow and the London cholera outbreak of 1854. On a hot summer day, a baby in London’s Soho neighborhood became ill with diarrhea, and in the custom of the time, the baby’s mother threw the waste in the cesspool outside their apartment. The cesspool leaked into the Broad Street pump’s well, and in the span of a few weeks’ time, over 600 people in the neighborhood died of cholera. At the time, the idea that disease could travel through water was completely new and shocking, and by assembling the history of the outbreak, John Snow, a physician, and Henry Whitehead, a reverend, gave the world public health.
The Ghost Map tells two stories: the first is the story of how Snow and Whitehead investigated the outbreak, determined its origin, and disabled the well, and the second is the story of how Snow’s investigation was tossed aside by a competing school of thought.
The book describes Snow and Whitehead as a somewhat unlikely pair. Snow was a well-respected physician who developed early protocols for using ether and chloroform for anesthesia, though he had a “hobby-like” interest in cholera epidemics, which were common in London at the time. Whitehead was the head of St. Luke’s church in Soho, and he carefully observed the goings-on in his neighborhood. The epidemic exploded in only a few days, which attracted the attention of both men, and together, they interviewed residents and studied the neighborhood until they’d identified the pump as the source of the outbreak. They didn’t even know that germs existed.
At the time, before the scientific community and the public had understood and accepted the existence of germs, there were two schools of though on epidemiology. The first school hypothesized that some sort of agent caused diseases to infect individuals, though they didn’t know the nature of the agent. Not many scientists or physicians at the time adopted this theory, but Snow did. The second school was much more popular; it held that the environment, or miasma, caused illness. By simply being or breathing in a dirty environment, the person became ill. The miasma theory was popular because at the time, there were many epidemics in London and London was unfathomably (to me, at least) filthy. There were no sewers. People often walked through sewage in their basements and in the streets, and it was all over their food, homes, and drinks. Plus, the air was full of smoke and smog. The newly-formed public health department in London conducted its own investigation of the cholera outbreak and concluded that the dirty environment was the cause of the outbreak and that the Snow report was wrong. Fortunately, the contagions from the Snow report converged with the dirty environment theory, so while Snow didn’t receive accolades for his findings during his lifetime, the public health department did not reattach the pump and put in sewers across the city to prevent future outbreaks.
Johnson assembles historical detail into a novel-like narrative, which is effective, and I especially like how Johnson occasionally pauses the narrative to marvel at the story. As I’m reading, I’m often amazed at how small details can change the course of history, and Johnson shares the same sentiment. He writes about how the victims of cholera had no idea that their choices – stopping by the Broad Street pump for a drink after work or washing down their pudding with a glass of water – would be of any importance to us today, much less that they would change the way the world fights diseases.
Finally, Johnson’s epilogue moves the lessons from the story to today. He sees the world moving to an increasingly urban setting, which can promote education, health, and population control, while still leaving us vulnerable to pandemics and disasters. He’s especially concerned about nuclear war, which is a long way from the Broad Street pump, but is still of course a worry in modern times. Interestingly, Johnson writes about the risk of an Ebola outbreak spreading across the world’s cities, a timely illustration of a public health struggle. In the end, Johnson is hopeful that the lessons from Snow’s investigations lead us to develop increasingly sophisticated means to protect our modern cities from disease.
Rural poverty in the US is prevalent, insidious, and yet drowned out. For a concise and provocative description of rural poverty, I recommend Annie Lowrey’s June New York Times Magazine article, “What’s the Matter with Eastern Kentucky?”. For a longer exploration of the subject, I’ve just finished three books on rural poverty:
Of the three books, Methland was written by a journalist, while Hollowing Out the Middle and Those Who Work, Those Who Don’t were written by sociologists. As you can imagine, the former is more of a wide-ranging, storytelling exploration of several main and side characters, while the latter are much more academic and focused on how their subjects reveal various concepts. All three are approachable and interesting, and I’m glad I read them as a group, because the ideas across all three intertwined to tell a difficult story of endurance, frustration, and hope.
I had my ten year high school reunion last year. Ahead of time, I was excited to hang out with the friends I see all the time, catch up with the ones I don’t, and talk to all kinds of people I don’t see much any more. I also wanted the husband to meet the characters from the stories I tell him. The night was a blast, and I hope to see most people again before we hit 15 years, especially now that I live nearby.
But anyway, ten years. I read an article recently about how people of my generation, the millennials, are often nostalgic about things that happened just a few years ago, probably because the rate of change in technology is so high (I’d link the article but it’s lost on my Twitter feed). I think I’ve been thinking about high school more than usual lately not only because of the reunion but also because I live nearby for the first time since I graduated. That’s my frame of reference for here, and for the past year,it’s like I’ve been relearning how to live here as an adult, which sounds silly but is true. At some point, I started thinking about my old classes and the books I read in them, and I’ve decided to go back through them, to see whether they are as I remember them and whether I think anything different about them now.
For now, I’ve reread three of them that I haven’t read since high school. I skipped over the ones I’ve read multiple times since then – The Great Gatsby, Hamlet, The Catcher in the Rye – because I can’t remember what I thought about them the first time through, and I also focused on books I read in class instead of those I read on my own (no one wants to hear about my first slog through Walden or the winter of Ayn Rand. Not yet, anyway.) So here we go:
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
I first read To Kill a Mockingbird half my lifetime ago, as required reading the summer before I started high school. My copy has all my vocabulary test words underlined in green; I was so new to being allowed to write in books that I used a pencil and didn’t dare mark up the book any more than that. I think we spent the full first quarter of ninth grade analyzing the book chapter by chapter, but to tell the truth, I didn’t remember much about it except that it was about early civil rights in the South and included a misunderstood recluse as a next door neighbor.
But really so much of the book is about Scout and her coping with growing up, and I’d overlooked or forgotten that. In the summers, she romps with her brother Jem and the neighborhood kids, playing tricks on one another and wondering about Boo Radley, the aforementioned recluse. All the while, she notices that Jem is growing aloof and that being ladylike is just no fun at all.
Underneath Scout’s adventures of fun and self, she struggles to find out where she belongs. Jem becomes more aloof and stops playing with her all the time. He family’s place in the town’s social structure crumbles when her father, Atticus, defends the rape case in court. At tea, the ceremony and habits of the ladies in front of her become more appealing to Scout, if only for their black-and-white rules and niceties.
Upon rereading, Scout’s transition into growing up was the most compelling to me and, in a way, her perspective on the trial and her father’s actions made Atticus appear all the greater.
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Of all three books, A Tale of Two Cities was the most disappointing upon the reread. In my mind, it was a romantic story of love and redemption in the middle of a revolution run by a crazed mob. Reading it again, while it was still an enjoyable story, the love and redemption seem unnecessary, and the mob was so oppressed for so long that they had to grab what freedom they could when they had the chance.
There’s a fundamental unbalance between how good the “good characters” are and how bad the “bad characters” are. Throughout the book, Sidney Carton and the other characters repeatedly mention what a bad man Sidney is, and I really don’t understand why. Sure, he drinks, likes to party and occasionally insults the ladies, but I don’t understand how these propensities make him so unforgivable and hateful to the other characters and to himself. Do the characters overly equate morality and etiquette? I don’t think they do, and from what else I’ve read from Charles Dickens, that doesn’t seem like him, either to make etiquette so important or to mock characters who think it is. Maybe I missed something, but Carton doesn’t seem bad enough to justify the choices Dickens makes for him.
Also, in the past, I remember thinking that Madam and Monsieur Defarge were the antagonists, evil entities to root against. Now, I couldn’t help but think about what terrible lives they’d had until the revolution. Their money and property were stolen, their family members raped, their children starved – how could these people do anything else but seek revenge? Even if Charles Darnay was innocent, his ancestors were guilty and those people certainly wouldn’t have spared anyone associated with their enemies. And how could the Defarges and their fellow poor even understand the concept of mercy or fairness, when even their Church was crooked too? I know Dickens is trying to point out the irony in the destruction and oppression wrought by a group claiming to espouse fraternity and liberty, but there’s so little sense of why the revolution occurred that it’s almost like Dickens is hiding it.
Finally, I’m not really sure what Darnay, the good guy, is trying to do. He has some sort of nebulous “duty” to France, but it’s not entirely clear what that means. Why does he want to go back there in the first place? Is he supposed to be some sort of spy? If so, why this come up at the beginning of the book and then disappear for the the rest of it, particularly during his trial? We don’t really see him do anything particularly brave or heroic, so I’m not sure why he’s seen as the protagonist here.
Perhaps the point of the book are that the good and the bad aren’t always what they seem. Like I wrote above though, I just don’t see a novel constructed in that way as something Dickens would try to do. He’s so thematically straightforward in all of his other books that that interpretation doesn’t fit him.
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
I think Heart of Darkness was probably the most difficult book assigned to me. I read it during the summer between my sophomore and junior years, and reading it during the summer heat, while somehow appropriate given the content, made sitting down to read the dense writing just unbearable. We had an array of 10 or 12 books from a list and had to turn in an essay about four of them at the end of the summer, and if you’ve read a few posts in this blog you know I couldn’t help myself, read 12 books, wrote 12 essays, worried over the best four to turn in, and then barely remembered them by the time school started. So I read Heart of Darkness during the summer and a few months later again during school, and in class, we just kept talking about dark and light imagery. There were nights when our assignment was to go through sections of the book and underline all the imagery we could find, and I can still see the faded pencil marks in my book. Most of my classmates hated or didn’t read the book, which made our class discussions, which were already miserable because of all the imagery, just unbearable. Homework and class time didn’t help my understanding of the book; I knew that light meant good and dark meant bad unless they didn’t, and the book was about a journey to the center of the colonial Congo to find a rogue employee who was either sick or a genius or both.
Time passed; I saw Apocalypse Now and way too many episodes of Anthony Bourdain, and then I married a man who counts Heart of Darkness as one of his favorite books. So, I returned to it.
What I understand now that I didn’t necessarily understand then is the book’s psychological intensity. Aside from the physical journey into Africa is the uncertainty about the effects of the trip on the minds of those who take the journey. In solitude and danger, they either cling to their “civilized” ways or become something new entirely, which we see in Kurtz.
This month, May 2014, I’ve reached a milestone: I’ve been keeping my book list for 10 years, and in that time, I’ve read 500 new books in their entirety.
Looking back on the list is like looking through a mental scrapbook. I started the list right at the beginning of my Great Books program in college, and scrolling down the page, I can trace the timeline from the Greeks to the early Catholic thinkers to the Enlightenment to modernism and post-modernism. Then, in 2007, the list becomes less academic and veers into all sorts of fictional, food-related, and social issue directions (I wish I’d also kept a spreadsheet with stats on genre, time spent reading, gaps between books, etc. so I could look through that now). Finally, in the past year or two, a stronger health care theme emerges, and that’s where graduate school brings me today.
But the list is also a story of place. There are clear connections to Notre Dame and to Ohio State, but there are more subtle evocations present as well. Someone looking through the list for the first time might see the Bill O’Reilly books near the top and think they’ve stumbled on the blog of a righty, but they’d be missing the summer I tore through all the books in my parents’ living room, regardless of who wrote it. Those books were actually OK, too. And in the long list from 2008, there’s the story of many, many trips to the Madison Public Library to shield my mind from the worry that comes with homesickness and figuring out adulthood. And then it’s back to South Bend where I could lay my hands on all the Graham Greene I’d ever want and where I borrowed all the Game of Thrones books from a friend. Then, there’s a very shortened list from last year, when, feeling nostalgic because of my 10-year high school reunion, I reread all the books I read in high school, and re-reads don’t go on the list.
I’m really glad I started this project and am thankful for all the real stories that go with the written stories. I don’t know if I’ll continue writing synopses of the books here, but I’ll always keep that list, until the day I no longer can.
Ad and Books 