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26. by Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer (no photo)
Finish date: 07 December 2015
Genre: Social issues
Rating: A-
Review: Cashless Americans need a compassionate and take-no-prisoners PR firm to align their experience with other Americans' perception of it. This book should be the basis of the campaign kickoff.

Three days before President Clinton was nominated for what turned out to be his second term as US President, he signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act into law. The Act ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), a program that provided cash assistance to needy Americans, and inaugurated Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which provides a diverse array of benefits selected by the individual states to families with working or about-to-be working adults. Unfortunately, it made no provisions for adults who can't find or keep jobs, an omission that has had the direst consequences in an America with fewer and fewer jobs, an America where the available jobs aren't geographically or structurally accessible to the people who need them.

These are the $2.00 a day Americans, who in 2011 lived in 1.5 million households with 3 million children, households with no more than $2 a day in cash income per person. Edin and Shaefer tell the stories of eight such households. They show the association between the cash-starved households and the values of the the society that funds the benefits.

Those values were too much at odds with the idea of state-supported lives of leisure and baby-raising that President Reagan drilled into our consciousness (leisurely baby-raising? Come on!). So AFDC was righteously undone in favour of a benefit system that was in tune with American values of hard work and personal responsibility, and the authors don't lament AFDC's passing, seeing it more as an idea whose time had gone. But they make us powerfully aware of the weaknesses of the aid that has replaced it. You can't buy underwear for the kids with supplemental nutritional assistance.

The book is short on coherent solutions ("Where, then, from here?"), but these are researchers and historians, not policy makers. I would love to see a program for the action that this books is a call for.

27. by Caitlin Doughty
Finish date: 10 December 2015
Genre: Memoir, death
Rating: B
Review: "...now there was nothing more elegant in my eyes than a corpse in its natural state, prepared with dignity by her own family". This is the final stop on Doughty's pilgrimage through the Unholy Land of America's death management panorama, which begins when she decides to uncomplicate and desensitize her relationship with the state of pushing up daisies.

Doughty, born twenty years after Jessica Mitford published The American Way of Death, doesn't expose dirty tricks as Mitford did. The death sanitizers have made strides since then, and most of us have bought into the concept of death as an irregular life event, something vaguely embarrassing and best dealt with by professionals behind the scenes. Doughty's goal is to bring death and corpse management practices front and center, to let the sun shine on them to encourage the sillier and more senseless to wither away and themselves die. I say: "Go Caitlin!"

The reason I don't rate the book more highly is that it goes beyond embracing death as routine to lingering over-long on descriptions of molten fat and putrefaction. I get it, I'm not revolted by it, but I don't need to steep in it. And much of the dialogue reported in the book is more unnatural than the death practices that it condemn.

But there' so much good and interesting information in the book, of a type you would be unlikely to look up (for example, US Postal service requirements for packing ashes for mailing, or the prevalence of ulcers in corpses delivered from nursing homes that overemphasize death prevention and underemphasize geriatric care) that it's hard not to give it wavering thumbs up.

As an aside, I love the happy result of mixing up a highly educated and intelligent scholar with a job that doesn't always attract operators who are so articulate and analytically skilled. I don't like what's happened to middle-class, living wage jobs but that doesn't prevent me from appreciating some of the unexpected and enlightening consequences.

by Jessica Mitford

28. by byMichelle Alexander
Finish date: 14 Dec 2015
Genre: Current Affairs
Rating: A*
Review: Imagine spending some time with a written version of Rubin's Vase (the illustration that shows a vase or a pair of faces depending on how what you perceive as the foreground and the background). When you start, you've only ever seen the face. The more you study it, perhaps with a little interpretative help, the clearer the faces are. By the end, all you can see is the faces.

Michelle Alexander looked at the vase of the US practice of mass incarceration of drug offenders, and saw the faces of a new system of racialized social control. Thanks to her powerful, understated prose and her surgically precise thinking, we see it too, from the first pages of the introduction until Chapter 6 (The Fire This Time), the title borrowed from James Baldwin's pair of essays urging a redirection of the narrow perception that framed "The Negro Problem" to an all-encompassing black and white quest for mutually dependent freedom.

Along the way we see consent searches, community policing, colourblindness, and the "failure" of black men to vote for change in a new light. Alexander leaves me ready to join a broad, community based civil rights movement that operates outside the courtrooms.

*The asterisk beside the A isn't meant to detract from the rating. Instead, I wanted to use it to note the puzzling absence of African American women from Alexander's analysis. Her book indicts a society that fears and locks up its black male members. Where are its black female members?

by James Baldwin

Great review Nancy. I also found her book very compelling.

Alisa wrote: "Great review Nancy. I also found her book very compelling."

Thanks, Alisa! Three years after the 2010 publication of her book, prison populations had been modestly declining for three consecutive years (all of the reductions are in state, not federal prison populations). At that rate of decline, in another 88 years we'll be back to 1980 incarceration levels. Time for Alexander to write again. (Data from The Sentencing Project )

26. by Allen Kurzweil
Finish date: 09 December 2015
Genre: Nonfiction
Rating: A-
Review: Reading Kurzweil's memoir plus is like sitting in an overstuffed armchair with a glass of merlot listening to a new acquaintance tell you how he resolved a childhood trauma that influenced him for years--on and off for forty years. You don't share this particular trauma, but you do have an unresolved girlhood distress lurking in your psyche, and it's fascinating and affirming to hear the resolution unfold.

Kurzweil was the target of a boarding-school bully. The physical misery wasn't great, but the emotional pain from the bully's engineering of the disappearance of a legacy from Kurzweil's deceased father was shattering. Twenty years later, he began the investigation that led to his bizarre catch-up meetings with the bully twenty years after that.

This is the story of the investigation, of the reunions and mostly of the browbeater's career as a con man and prison inmate. Two of the victims of the con in which he played a minor, though pivotal, role make appearances as well. It's a curious and ultimately satisfying tale.

27. by William Deresiewicz (no photo)
Finish date: 11 December 2015
Genre: Nonfiction, social science
Rating: B+
Review: Ideas explode before your eyes at the pace of popcorn in a high-powered microwave. The ideas are liberating and energizing and a little overwhelming (maybe I shouldn't have consumed this long essay in a single day). They're all about the current education "system" in the US, the purpose of a college education, and the leadership class that the system has produced.

Deresiewicz is filled with righteous anger at the Ivy League, with enough left over for U.S. News & World Report's college rankings, the funding banquets laid out for research scholars who don't teach, and condescending "giving back" community service that reinforces the class differences between the parties to the charitable transaction. Irritation oozes from every syllable in Parts 1 and 4 and sounds a bit like the coach's talk at halftime when we're down 26 to 10.

The best and most challenging material is in Part 2, where Deresiewiecz talks with passion about what college is for ("Most of what you come across in college will inevitably fade from memory. What's left over...is you"), and the duty and pleasure of inventing your life. I wish he'd written this 46 years ago, as I was entering the Ivy League (and when he was 5!)

The book lacks a bibliography, which is a shame, because I wanted to pursue all of the authors and thinkers who inspire him. If he rouses half a hundred of us to read or reread Middlemarch, the world will be a slightly better place.

by George Eliot

28. by William J. Mann
Finish date: 22 December 2015
Genre: True crime
Rating: A-
Review: Lovers of 1920's US historical detail will be more than satisfied with Tinseltown. They might even find themselves inundated with it, and wonder, as I did, why Mann chose to include such a wealth of story lines. Surely some of them should have been saved for another book?

But that's only in the middle. At the end I discovered that every one of them informed the saga of how early filmmakers invented scandal management by cover-up to protect themselves from the morality crusaders of the era. Mann unites several salacious stories, including a 1922 Hollywood murder that went unsolved until 1964, and fits the pieces together clearly and elegantly. There aren't any stray side journeys here.

Among the related strands are the the stories of in-laws and competitors Adolph Zukor and Marcus Loew, rival theatre-chain owners and grandfathers to the same child; genuine star Mabel Normand, not-quite star Mary Miles Minter, and star aspirant Margaret Gibson. I didn't have preconceived opinions of any of these people, and so I simply found their stories interesting and informative. The real eye-opener for me was the material on Will Hays, whose name is synonymous with the "Hays Office" and prudish censoring and whose character turns out to have been enlightened and caring.

The book is divided into the unspoken equivalent of soundbites, 71 short chapters which made it a little choppy for me. I would have preferred less jumping about from story to story, but this technique may have been necessary to keep all the separate threads moving to a simultaneous and satisfying conclusion.

I read that book a few months ago and enjoyed it. I had heard of the Taylor murder before but this filled in some of the gaps. Interesting stuff!!

29. by Julie Klam
Finish date: 24 December 2015
Genre: Nonfiction
Rating: A-
Review: Role models for canine good citizenship Klam's dogs are not. I wouldn't want to run into any of them on a Manhattan elevator. But I am so happy to give them a little place in my heart because, rowdy and growly as they are, they are completely engaging and friend-worthy.

Eleven happiness lessons teach us the ridiculous ("How to Feel Good About Your Neck") and the sublime ("How to Mourn the Loss of a Friend") and much wisdom in between. As a human adjunct to a rescued terrier mutt (most common comment from passers-by: "That's a big dog") the lesson I took to heart was that it's OK if your dog isn't even within hailing distance of perfect. And that dancing with my dog (to the tune of Cheek to Cheek) is what I want to be doing New Year's Eve.

I read this book from start to finish on Christmas Eve (with occasional breaks for rabbit chasing and grass sniffing). It was the very thing to celebrate the season of giving and receiving.

30. by Héctor Tobar
Finish date: 26 December 2015
Genre: History
Rating: A
Review: About midway through Tobar's account, Drill 10B finishes its laborious 688 metre (.4 mile) journey from the earth's surface to a below-ground tunnel. The tunnel and its adjacent spaces have been the primitive lodgings of 32 Chilean and one Bolivian ore miners for 17 days in winter 2010. Until then, the story describes how the 33 interact (or withdraw from) each other in this accidental community, whose members quickly take on roles from the above-ground society from which they are now completely cut off. Some plan an escape, some forage for food in the trash, others distract themselves and each other with endless games of dominoes.

After the drill reaches them, the community dynamics change as the miners become the captive stars of an intense drama with plot hairpins that a reality TV show could only dream of. They jockey for "face" time with people at the top, they form a partnership to ensure that all will benefit equally from selling their story, and some dream of becoming non-famous again.

Tobar recounts all of this flawlessly, with clarity and simplicity and a wealth of sympathetic but unclouded character insights that turn the mass of miners into individuals we care about. He describes the convoluted underground prison of passages, gaping holes and impenetrable walls so well that we could easily navigate our way through it. This is literary journalism, nonfiction that reads like a novel.