RECENT READING
I have two nonfiction books to recommend and, with you know who now in office, the first one about poverty seems especially appropriate.
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond. This is an important book and one that takes a different look at the lives of poor people in Milwaukee in 2008 and 2009. Desmond views poverty as a relationship between landlords and tenants and shows how entangled and enmeshed renters’ lives are with landlords who hold the threat of eviction over them. Desmond lived in a trailer park inhabited by white residents for four months and then spent 10 months living in an apartment owned by a black woman. Like many people, I thought that most poor people lived in public housing, but in this city, and probably more generally, public housing was very often not available, the wait time was years or decades, or the individuals who needed it most didn’t qualify for one reason or another. Most of those evicted or those who moved out voluntarily (rather than being given an eviction notice and taken to court) were women and especially women with children. Having children tripled the odds of being evicted.
Once evicted, these folks often had to look at 80 or 90 apartments before finding a place to live; if unsuccessful, they ended up in a shelter for weeks or even months. And the rents they paid for their apartments (frequently in poor condition with non-working appliances or holes in walls or roofs) were market rate—the same amount as paid for nice, clean apartments in the more desirable neighborhoods. Over the course of his field work, Desmond followed eight individuals and their families and observed their struggles with addiction, job loss, new schools for their kids, and the possibility of jail time. Only one person, a single male, succeeds in breaking the cycle, overcoming his addiction and becoming a productive citizen again.
Matthew Desmond, a Harvard professor who won a MacArthur Fellowship (“Genius” Award) in 2015, offers his thoughts on possible solutions in a very comprehensive “About This Project” at the end of the book.
When in French: Love in a Second Language by Lauren Collins. This is yet another memoir in my ongoing fascination with reading about how other people perceive their lives. A New Yorker staff writer, Collins’s book is ostensibly about falling in love with Olivier, moving to Geneva, marrying him, and dealing with communicating with him and others in French. But it’s much more than that. Collins is a small town Southern girl from Wilmington, North Carolina, who moves to London where she meets Olivier and then follows him to Geneva when his job takes him there. She is biting in describing her response to the city of Geneva and candid about her linguistic faux pas and her cultural misconceptions. Along the way she provides nuggets of information on the history of languages and her canvas becomes much larger than just her stumbling journey to fluency. At some points, I felt she was trying to cover too much material, but I stuck with her. Here’s one example of some linguistic history:
In 1880 there were 641 German newspapers in the United. States. …One of them, Pennsylvanischer Staatsbote, had been in 1776 the first publication to announce that the Declaration of Independence has been adopted. English speakers had to wait until the next day when the document’s full text appeared in the Philadelphia Evening Post.
And one of her observations on her extreme desire to get married:
I had exactly two anxieties about cross-cultural marriage: (1) I feared being marooned, at the end of my life, in some French nursing home where no one had ever heard of baseball; and (2) it made me sad to think that my kids would miss out on one of the great joys of an American childhood, learning to spell Mississippi. But, generally, I didn’t see what the big deal was. Tied up as I was in rules, timetables, and proverbs about buying cows, I couldn’t take Olivier at his word. [That he loved her and wanted to be together and have a family with her.]
If nothing else, you will think a bit more about the language you speak and how you acquired it, and if you’ve ever tried immersion in another country and language, you’ll empathize with her experience.
Header photo: Taken at Selby Botanical Garden (JWF)
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