notanotherbookreview

  Borough Hall  Mid-Century Memoir. "What was it like in 1969 when young people tried to remake the world?"  Answers-PART 1 "Normal".  PART 2 "Activism"  next week. This is a personal essay through the imperfect filter of memory. "What was it like in 1969, when young people tried to remake the world? " I was recently asked this and found it difficult to summarize that time, when "normal" became something else.  2022 is also an era of intense social upheaval.  How the "normal" of 1969 spurred serious generational change is useful to understand, especially with conservative groups lobbying to turn back the cultural "clock."  Life  Magazine  featured Haight-Ashbury's hippie mecca, yet racist conservative George Wallace was elected in my high school's mock elections for the 1968 race against Richard Nixon. "Times were achanging" somewhere else than my Philly borough, twenty minutes away from downtow...

Separate but Equal ? Individual and Community since the Enlightenment By Richard Herr (Berkeley Public Policy Press). Richard Herr's book about Individual and Community is academic but accessible and well worth the effort. I read this because I wanted to understand why our Democracy worked in the past and whether our current turmoil seriously threatens that stability. We have "disruption" caused by our government's dismantelling of major institutions, as well as a rise of populist tribalism. It seems sudden that now a homogenous America, led by white males with wealth, are solely entitled to education, health care and national resources as part of their privilege, while  more diverse groups are suspect. Previously, diversity of individuals with all equally sharing resources, was a national ideal. , I look forward to a more inclusive future. So I checked the past. This conflict between a yearning for a homogenous nation vs. a desire for a diverse mosaic of indi...

THE LYNCHING: The Epic Courtroom Battle that Brought Down the Klan  (William Morrow Hardcover) is an exciting and impressive read, a page turner that is also a history of a pivotal event in the Civil Rights struggle. As a Northerner, the Southern attachment to slavery and later segregation, as part of "traditional values" has always been a personal disconnect. I once publicized Klan-Destine Relationships: A Black Man's Odyssey in the Ku Klux Klan by Daryl Davis, a Grammy award winning musician, who risked his life on a mission to understand hate. Were these people monsters or would he find a common humanity? Davis found shared ground but didn't address the origins of hate crimes. In Laurence Leamer's THE LYNCHING, racial hatred is explained in the context of the personal histories of those involved in a horrific hate crime in 1981, when Jim Crow was a fading memory. The incident was sparked by a trial of a black man accused of murdering a white Police Sergea...