A Nation Challenged

A Nation Challenged: A Visual History of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
© 2002 The New York Times
240 pages

The first few anniversaries of 9/11 had a weight as they approached -- not only for what memories they evoked, but for the speculation that another attack might be attempted on the day itself.  But as the years passed, that salience eroded.  This past anniversary, in 2018, was different -- different because it was a Tuesday, an echo of the day itself.  I couldn't help but remember the shock and fear of that day, and especially of the early morning when things kept happening and we didn't know when it would stop or what might happen next. This past week, for the first time, I sat and watched extensive videos relating to 9/11 -- not  news footage, but video shot on the ground itself, after the attack or even before it,  seeing the towers both in their prime and in their demise.  In this mood I couldn't help but reading through one of the books I put on display at the library, A Nation Challenged.

In the days that followed the obscene attack on New York City in 2001, the New York Times began publishing coverage of the aftermath and its investigation in a special feature called "A Nation Challenged". This feature, an insert inside the paper,   ran until the end of the year. A Nation Challenged collects many of the photographs and articles from that run into a single collection to document the day itself,  stories of the people involved, and review the consequences of America's grief as it began a war in Afghanistan which, like a mythical hydra, spawns more conflicts the more we persist in flailing away at it.  The information included, however, is not merely text and photos; instead, there are other visual aides. A two-page spread reveals the interior of both towers,  and includes analysis of how each fell.  Another two-page spread provides a transcript of communications chatter as aviation authorities and other pilots realized that something was wrong.  Coverage of the day itself is only a part of the book, as subsequent sections review the clean-up process and the treatment of debris as a mass crime scene. Also included is information Osama bin Laden's background, and the political/ethnographic breakdown of Afghanistan.

While I've never read any other 9/11 books, this particular volume recommends itself as a remembrance.  Also, if you have time,   in late August a video was posted containing 30 minutes of restored footage shot on the day itself,  near the WTC site immediately following the collapse of tower two.  The photojournalist responsible, Mark LaGanga, spoke with people fleeing the scene, toured WTC-7 (empty save a few LEOs confirming the building was clear), and captured the collapse of WTC-1 on film.  It is unlike anything I have ever seen.

The Job

The Job: True Tales from a New York City Cop
© 2015 Steve Osborn
272 pages

Steve Osborn grew up by his father's side in a bar, standing on boxes to play pinball and idolizing the men his father hung out with. They were all cops, and their lurid stories of policing the City's streets captivated him. He knew that's what he wanted to do -- and at some point in the early eighties, he became a patrolman in New York City, and started collecting stories of his own. The Job shares some twenty-odd tales of life on the beat, starting from his first rookie patrol to his last takedown.  Although these stories are shared for their entertainment value, they're not uniformly comic;  instead, we see a young adrenaline junkie maturing into a tough beat cop, whose emotional walls are sometimes broken by events like 9/11,

The Osborn evidenced here is a natural beat cop; he has no desire to be a detective, rise as an administrator, or work for something like the FBI;  his happy place is the city street,  where he can mingle with people and watch them, and 'collar' the ones that prey on their fellow New Yorkers.  I referred to Osborn as adrenaline junkie before, because he loves chasing down suspects, and his enthusiasm is such that in his early years they led him to doing really dumb things, like following a robber into the subway tunnels.  When he'd gotten far enough in be stuck, and felt a train approaching from behind him, he could only think that this was a stupid, stupid way to die and that from now on, he'd be the morbid example used in Track Safety classes.  Osborn's passion for the job, and for his home city in particular, allowed him to flourish as an officer and truly connect with his partners,  some perpetrators, and citizens themselves.

Although throughout the book Osborn established himself as a world-weary cop,  forever scanning and processing the people and places around him for trouble,  using dark humor to cope with the horror and uncertainty that his occupation makes him face every day,  a few stories show another side.  Early on, for instance, he's assigned to investigate a foul odor in an apartment -- but runs into a problem when he learns that that the foul odor is most definitely a body, and the deceased's parents are waiting outside the apartment demanding to see their child one last time.    The young lady has at this point been dead for days,  and decaying in a stifling-hot July apartment.  Knowing he could not allow the woman's mother to see the ghastly remains, the putrefied blob of something that was human,  Osborn finds some source of inner strength that allows him to take a knee and convince the sobbing, desperate woman that she doesn't want to see her daughter this way.   It's one of the first times Osborn realizes his job was about taking care of people, not just chasing bad guys.     Another break in the tough-guy wall comes shortly after 9/11, when -- scarfing down McDonalds during a multiday shift pulling out bodies from the rubble --  Osborn discovers a card made of construction paper tucked into the bag. Somehow, schools across the country had gotten their kids to make "thinking of you" cards for fire&police officers, and place them in the meals being given out to first responders. The realization that New York is not alone, that people across the nation are thinking and standing with them, almost makes the grizzled lieutenant cry in public.

Page for page, 400 Things Cops Know* is more informative about the way police officers notice and interpret the world, but The Job humanizes an occupation and an institution (the NYPD) that is  being increasingly villanized.   While Osborn doesn't comment on this directly, he does include stories of being attacked by mobs just for making arrests on the streets, and presumably his sympathies are with the officers.



*I read 400 Things last year, but did so over the course of several months, reading a few chapters at a time when visiting a local Books a Million and drinking coffee. Because I kept skipping around, I'm not sure I read it in its entirety.

The Big Necessity

The Big Necessity: the Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why it Matters
© 2008, 2014 Rose George
238 pages

In its initial publication, The Big Necessity may have been an eye-opening look into how many human beings still suffer for want of life-saving sanitation. Already familiar with the sorry state of toilet affairs in parts of the global south, though, I read and enjoyed this more as the story of governments, charitable organizations, private citizens, and small businesses who are steadily working to bring their places to health. The solution is not always technological, although reading about home digesters that convert offal into kitchen gas and fancy Japanese toilets is most interesting. (The digesters are particularly important: not only do they give households a degree of self-sufficiency, they guard against local trees being stripped for fuel, and save China's rural households money in terms of domestic fuel and fertilizer.) A culture of hygiene must always be fostered, and through means that take into account the local culture. The Big Necessity provides a call to arms,  takes readers into the sewers of NYC and London as well as the  Chinese countryside, and offers a view of toiletry's cutting edge. A very interesting book all around, then, and with only the faintest whiff of toilet humor -- the sole instance of which is that George refers to something as execrable.


George is also the author of Ninety Percent of Everything, known in the UK as Deep Sea and Foreign Going: Inside Shipping.


Related:
Flushed! How the Plumber Saved Civilization, W. Hodding Carter

The Works

The Works: Anatomy of a City
© 2005  Kate Ascher
240 pages

Cities are, for my money, mankind's most astonishing invention. Their complexity is stupefying -- system within system, handling tons of material at any given time, whether the subject is cars across a bridge or the contents of a thousand home's flushing toilets. And the stakes are always high, with the health and happiness of millions on the line -- or at least, thousands. The Works is a dream of a book, a visual-rich guide to the many systems that keep cities thriving.  Author Kate Ascher throws light not on just the expected -- roads and utilities, say -- but also minor things like the postal service.  Using New York City as case study, Ascher explores systems for transportation, energy, communication, and sanitation in turn.

The Works stunned me again and again with its visuals. Readers are treated to an astonishing array of informative little diagrams: cutaways that show what's inside the Holland tunnel, for instance, or the underbelly of a street-sweeper, or the waterworks inside your average skyscraper. The pictures also demonstrate systems -- the chain of equipment required to convey power from a generating station into the average home, the links involved in a cell phone conversation,  Some of the visuals are clever: for instance, to illustrate the variety of goods a train might carry,  a cartoon representation of a real train runs along the bottom of every page in the chapter, each car marked with its contents. The same tactic is used to illustrate the electromagnetic spectrum in the chapter on communication.  The bounty of visual information here is ludicrous -- showcasing fleets of sanitation vehicles and subway cars,  mapping out train yards and container ship docks, -- it's staggering, really.  Statistics are presented visually, too, and of course there are tons of maps -- including one that shows all the traffic cameras in the city. There are a few sample pages on Streetsblog, all from the chapter on streets.

That's not to say The Works is merely a picture book, because there's no small amount of text here explaining the importance of all these systems, reviewing their evolution within New York City, and sharing the particulars of their operation.  Reading this book is kind of like reading Gone Tomorrow, Picking Up, The Grid,  Flushed! On the Grid, etc, all at once, all rolled into one, and with gobs and gobs and gobs of illustration.   It does lack a chapter on  the infrastructure of the internet, which isn't an oversight that would be made if it were published today.

• Related:
• On The Grid: A Plot of Land, an Average Neighborhood, and the Systems that Make Our World Work, Scott Huler.  Kind of like this but on a smaller scale with more detail and sans pictures.
• Straphanger,  Tom Standage
• Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of NYC, Robin Nagle

Taxi!

Taxi! A Social History of the New York City Cabdriver
©  2007 Graham Russell Gao Hodges
225 pages

No film set in New York City is complete without scenes of Manhattan traffic, dense with yellow cars -- the patrolling ranks of the cabs, shuttling a third of the city hither and yon.  Taxi! is exactly as it describes itself, a social history of New York cabbing.  The author begins in the early days of the automobile and moves forward to 2001.  Much of it is predictable but as-yet unexplored, the tale of cabdrivers' woes throughout the economic turbulence of the 20th century, their struggling to make ends meet against declining social status.  The author has a keen interest in unionization, devoting an entire chapter to it and touching on it several other times.   He sees a failure to successfully unionize as part of static or declining fortunes among cab drivers, although the failure is less political than structural. Cabs are not factories, and the abundance of independent owner-operators sapped what strength was found in bringing together the drivers for the large taxi fleets.  When economic pressures prompted the fleets to reduce their men to independent contractors, the attraction of cab-driving was further diminished as a career, and it became more the occupation of those looking for part-time work, or (in the case of immigrants) for any entrance into the American economy.  That grim economic trend is slightly offset by the author's continued examination of cab drivers in popular media, from the first days of film on. Who knew Babe Ruth once did a cameo in a taxi film?   The films tend to portray cab drivers as lonely commentators on the social scene, and sometimes shed light on cabbys' interesting connections with the criminal world.  In the roaring twenties and the Depression, cabbies sometimes earned extra money by connecting interested passengers to prostitutes and liquor.  The contentious relationship between cabs and cops that Melissa Plaut commented on in her Hack evidently has a long history, though where it begins is a chicken and egg quandary.  Taxi! is  quick read, dry in parts but largely informative and entertaining on the whole, aided by the author's latent passion for a job he once undertook himself.

Related:
Hack: How I Stopped Worrying About My Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab, Melissa Plaut

Picking Up

Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City
© 2014 Robin Nagle
304 pages

When young Robin Nagle stumbled upon a communal dumpsite in the middle of an otherwise picturesque meadow, she was astounded by the thoughtlessness of her fellow campers. Who did they think would take care of their rubbish, the  garbage fairy?  People rarely give thought to their garbage service, unless it hiccoughs, but sanitation workers are arguably more indispensable than police or firemen.  Given individuals can get by for decades without calling for fire or police services, but try going decades without the garbage man. Sure, if you have a suitable vehicle you can haul your own bags to the dump, but how do you feel about living in everyone else's rubbish?  A city like New York, a hive of millions of souls, would choke within days were it not for an efficient army of men and women in white trucks and olive uniforms hauling their refuse away.In Picking Up, Ms. Nagle joins those men, delivering stories and an inside look at a sanitation department working overdrive in New York City with unexpected humor.

Garbagemen are, despite the lack of a caste  system in the United States, our untouchables. We pretend not to notice these men and women whose job it is to take care of that which we have decided is beneath our attention. Certain aspects of their work can't fail but be noticed: garbage haulers and mechanical sweepers are work trucks, loud and odoriferous, and their working environment places them in the middle of every aspect of urban life.  The men and women themselves, however, are overlooked, unless they're being held as the subject of derision.  Ms. Nagle's time spent with the department -- first as an anthropology student, then as an actual worker --  looks at san-men square in the face. Through the details of their lives, Nagle teaches readers the ins and outs of keeping city streets clean.

Nagle begins with a brief history of garbage collection in New York, moving forward to present day municipal waste services. There are distinct operations;  the most prized work is picking up actual bags of trash, preferably dumped in one massive pile called a flat.  This is heavy and sometimes dangerous work, depending on what is being disposed, but it pays well.  Crews assigned to travel down a street dumping its public waste baskets into the truck face far more tedious hours, and street sweepers present their own challenge.  This work is constant;  sanitation never sleep, operating two shifts, and on some streets the the job is never done. As soon as a collection truck has finished its route, so many pedestrians have thrown their fast-food rubbish into the bins that they're already full and the truck makes the round again, like a very smelly bus stop.   In the winter, sanitation workers assume a second job -- clearing the streets after every snowfall.   Keeping the New York economy running on ice-free streets is such a demanding task that some DSNY planners regard plowing or preparing for plowing their first duty, with rubbish-hauling merely something to occupy time with during the summer.    What doesn't change with the seasons is the danger: sanitation work is the fourth-deadliest in the United States, behind airline piloting, logging, and commercial fishing. Spending eight to twelve hours working on city streets alive with traffic exposes sanitation workers to being mowed down by cars, and their crushing equipment is a peril to their limbs if not life.

Picking Up makes for fascinating reading; it's not so much about trash as the men who take care of it. Nagle's journey always stops at the transfer station; what happens to it after that, who else is involved in making it go "away", is not her concern.  This is a study of men (and a few stray women) at work, constantly keeping the commercial machinery of the City from  being clogged by its own refuse. It ventures to muse on waste and consumerism, slightly, but sticks mostly to regaling the reader with the diverse day to day experiences of the sanitation department -- navigating traffic in massive trucks, manhandling bag after bag of mysterious waste, dealing with unions, government bureaucracies, a distant city government, and a hostile if not dismissive public -- and how the men adapt.


Related:
Gone Tomorrow; Garbage Land.  What happens to trash after the transfer station.
Hack, Melissa Plaut.  Another account of driving/working in New York.
Pedal to the Medal,  a truck-driver turned sociologist's similar treatment of truck drivers

Hack

Hack: How I Stopped Worrying About What to do with my Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab
© 2008 Melissa Plaut
256 pages

At the age of twenty-nine, Melissa Plaut was let go from her job at an ad agency. She found the layoff liberating instead of terrifying, freeing her as it did from a safe but utterly meaningless job where she felt distinctly like a sell-out. Having spent most of her twenties spinning her wheels at one safe job or another, she opted this time to pursue adventure.   So it was that she braved the labyrinth of New York bureaucracy and the warren of traffic to become a New York City cabbie.Hack collects stories from her blog about working the city streets, and as they are arranged she becomes progressively more miserable, eventually downshifting to the point that driving the cab is a part-time hobby instead of a career.

Although her stories behind the wheel constitute the bulk of the book (the exception being frequent breaks to chat about her social life) there is not a lot of revealed about the inner workings of taxi services in general. A combination of customer service, chronic traffic jams, and steady physical deterioration, taxi driving quickly loses its allure and becomes a daily grind for her. Working with the public at large is not for the faint of heart, and quickly takes an emotional toll on Plaut as she endures all kinds of abuse and contempt from her patronage. Soon she is bypassing types  (teenagers and grizzly men) who she suspects will be fare-jumpers or trouble-makers, and feeling guilty for not being as trusting and open as she once was.  Driving a cab for twelve hours a day also wrecks her physically; the human body was not meant to spend half its time sitting in an odd-shaped seat, one leg constantly working the gas or brakes and the rest comparatively inactive while the driver deals with the constant stress of traffic, hunting fares, and restraining her bladder. One of Melissa's coworkers routinely soils himself, his continence wrecked by years of trying to hold it until demand slowed down.  Being the result of only a year or so behind the wheel, not much is said about the taxi industry in general: readers get a feel for how her particular company's practices work, but that's about it. There are moments of broader import, as when she weighs whether or not to make the most of a transit strike; ultimately, sheer fatigue at trying to work at all overwhelms any thoughfulness. Most of the book consists of stories about abusive customers, pushy cops, and her social life,  rendered with ample vulgarity. As one takes in her growing frustration -- and her inability to find anything outside of work that will meet her needs for meaning or happiness -- sympathy grows, especially when she witnesses a brutal traffic accident that reminds her all too much of her own near-miss, when a car struck her as a pedestrian and she was hospitalized.

Hack is interesting, though often ugly and not particularly useful about learning the ins and outs of the taxi service. It is good exposure to the raw experiences of drivers, especially New York cabbies who find the city government nearly as hostile to them as the public.

Downtown

Downtown: Its Rise and Fall (1880 - 1950)
© 2001 Robert Fogelson
544 pages

Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city!
Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty
 -- how can you lose? 
The lights are much brighter there, you can forget all your troubles, forget all your care...
("Downtown", Petula Clark)

When Petula Clark sang that she knew a place you can go, she may have well been speaking of downtown, for it used to be the place to go. Downtown chronicles the decline of American city centers, from Gilded Age preeminence to steady 20th century decay.  Though ostensibly concerning the local politics of major cities (New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles especially),  this is in a sense a social history, the complete transformation of how Americans lived, shopped, and traveled told through the decline of city centers.  The author writes without any apparent agenda, something of an accomplishment given the central subject of public policy.  Despite the role played by city, state, and the national government in hastening the disintegration of American cities,  even unintentionally, Fogelson's conclusion is that the state of urban development in the United States has more to do with an instinctual aversion to crowded city centers than public policy.  While that's an unsatisfactory explanation of suburbia, it doesn't diminish Downtown as a gold mine of information about the gradual transformation of transportation, housing, and public policy.

A city is nothing less than an economic engine, a place formed by the coming together of producers and merchants to trade. So it was with American downtowns; commercial enterprises preferred to congregate one another. The reasons were simple: prior to telecommunications and rapid transportation,  business transactions were handled in person, and companies preferred to be close to their supporting services -- to their bankers and insurance agencies, for instance.  What transportation systems existed at the time favored central locations for streamlined delivery and sales.  Given the eagerness of enterprises to acquire land close to the action downtown for commercial purposes,  land values there rose, and residents who could cashed in to settle in the country.  From those elevated land prices grew elevated buildings, when the arrival of industrial steel manufacturing allowed for it:  landowners wanted to maximize the use of the land they were paying so dearly for, and so the towers soared.  Downtown was not  exclusively commercial;  apartment buildings took equal advantage of the Bessemer process to compete with offices in the climb toward the sky.  Though some city-dwellers complained about the towers blocking light, few attempts to limit the height of buildings took; even what scant regulations appeared were quickly riddled through with variances.

The commericial life of the city would involve political meddling, however.   The attempt of an entire a metropolitan area to conduct its shopping, banking, and theater-going in one relatively small area lead to chronic congestion.  This is a congestion beyond levels appreciable by Americans today, even those who sit in LA traffic jams.  Photos show pedestrians shuffling down sidewalks cheek-to-jowl, trolleys crammed like sardines and the streets utterly filled with these as well as horse carriages, rag-wagons, and delivery carts.  That traffic was the economic life of the city, but the thought of competing in such crowds could fill some with despair: was it really worth it?  What it was worth is a question pursued by city governments who attempted to find some better way of transportation in and to the city center,  either elevated or underground train lines. (Trolleys were nice, of course, but the glorious chaos of city streets meant they were frequently slowed and altogether blocked by pedestrians and carts.)   Such prospects were expensive undertakings for private enterprise, and required considerably more politcking -- getting permissions from landowners to dig under them, for instance --  and so city governments themselves often had to take on the burden of attempting them.  The el-lines were not altogether popular, casting a constant gloom over the streets and treating pedestrians to showers of sparks and cinders.   Subways were much more expensive and time-consuming to build, a daunting fact given periodic economic downswings, but little by little the major cities edged into using them.

Change was in the air, however. Frustrated with the chronic congestion of the city center, made worse now by construction in the rights-of-way,  some urbanites  began shopping closer to home when they could.  Soaring land values also tempted start-up businesses into offering their goods outside the city center, as well; other residential areas might not deliver as much traffic, but concentrated near the trolley lines as they were,  a go could still be made.  Soon downtown apartment stores were joining them, sending out colonies -- branches -- to do business to residents who didn't want to come to them.  Technology was allowing for more distance between residents and businesses, too;  a man could now telephone his accountant, or extend his traveling range in a relatively cheap automobile.  The arrival of automobiles into the downtown core only worsened congestion, however, consuming much more space than pedestrian traffic, especially when parked. They arrived at the worst possible time, too, when the economic life of American cities was threatened by the worse economic disaster in its history. The Great Depression, which would break the back of American urbanism, arrived in 1929.

The calamitous effects of the Depression were not limited to the economic havoc itself. Land values fell, and under unrelenting property taxes --  constituting the bulk of municipal budgets --   more than a few landowners torn down their towers to build parking lots instead.  Requiring zero labor and taking in fees from automobiles, such holes in the urban fabric were known as 'taxpayers'.   As people continued to shop on the outskirts instead of the center, downtown merchants decided their problems were two-fold. First, there was there was the problem of accessibility; no one wanted to come downtown because it was too crowded, as Yogi Berra might have put it. Elevated lines were too unpopular, trolleys increasingly in dire straits because of overzealous expansion and a public that didn't want to pay for the privilege of traveling like a mobile sardine, and subways too expensive.  Secondly,  as the upper and middle classes drifted out of the city into the rail suburbs, they left a vacuum filled with the kind of  riff-raff that scared off good customers.   Who would come downtown when they had to pass through tenement blocks filled with gangs of working men, immigrants, and mobs of un-supervised youngsters?    Several factors conspired against these tenements:   Reform movements, which saw the tenements as unfit for human life; the downtown businessmen, who wanted to distance the rabble from their shoppers, and the government, which needed to create jobs. Together a plan was born:  seize the land,  tear down the tenements, and build things like freeways and 'modern'  housing projects.  Government involvement was now quite beyond municipalities: the Federal government itself was active in urban areas, deciding what buildings should go and what kind should remain.  FDR's new government programs effectively encouraged urban decentralization by subsidizing developing outside the city, and impeding  private development within it by refusing such largesse, especially when minorities were involved.  The damage done by this kind of improvement -- the erection of wall-like freeways gutting the city and directing activity into the suburbs --  continued to sap the strength of the once dominant city center. It had already fallen from THE place to do business to merely the main place for business; now it lost even that  as the future of America became written in interstates, parking lots, and  strip malls.


Downtown is a a wealth of information, and remarkably varied -- covering in different chapters the politics of subway construction or housing policy.  It is a dispassionate obituary, even if it misdiagnoses the  cause of death.



Related:

• Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of America, Kenneth Jackson
• Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton
• Getting There: The Epic Struggle Between Road and Rail in the 20th Century, Stephen Goddard
• Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Kay

The Great Cities in History

The Great Cities in History
© 2009 ed. John Julius Norwich
302 pages

            The Great Cities in History takes readers on a literary world tour, traveling through space and time to visit the greatest political bodies in history.  Civilization is nothing if not the ‘culture of cities, and here we experience its hotspots.  Historian John Julius Norwich and a host of other historians deliver celebratory treatments of cities within their realm of expertise, covering six continents and lauding every place from the ancient to the modern.  Here are the locus points of empires, world-spanning religions,  and prosperous commercial enterprises  This is a work of historical tourism; the authors are sharing each site and its community’s story with us in the way that a tour guide might. Most of the cities are still occupied in the present day, but the challenges mentioned are limited to environmental degradation.  The text is lavishly decorated with hundreds of illustrations, including full-page photographs, art reprints that show scenes of local culture, and photos of surviving artifacts (in the case of extinct cities).  The cities are organized on the basis of when they achieved their greatest historical impact, so we begin with Uruk and end with cities that appear to be leading the way into the future, like Shanghai and New York. Some cities merit multiple mentions; Constantinople reappears as Istanbul, Rome and London  pop up twice, and Mexico City questionably qualifies given its siting upon the also-covered Tenochtitlan.  The near east and the adjacent Mediterranean world predominate, of course.  The dozens of sections are organized by timeframe, but not linked together with a common narrative; some authors focus onl y on their city’s greatest moment, while others track to the current day. They make for fun reading, however, least for those with even the slightest appreciation for history. Modern readers accustomed to the world being divided up by nation states, drawing great boxes around swathes of earth and claiming them as their own,  should find a renewed appreciation here for the fact that human history has been dominated not by kings and abstract empires, but physical polities defined by stone walls.   Great Cities is a treasure to look at and makes for excellent light historical reading.

 

 

 

 

The Box

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
© 2006 Marc Levinson
376 pages

It’s not every day an invention completely revolutionizes its industry, let alone the world. And yet that’s what the shipping container, a mere  box, did. Within a few years’ time, it rose from one ambitious entrepreneur’s scheme for expediting freight shipments into the global standards, one which completely replaced methods of shipping which had endured for thousands of years. Gone were the huge numbers of longshoremen required to pack and unpack hundreds of pallets per ship, and the 'inventory shrinkage' that accompanied it. Within a decade of its introduction, mighty ports like London and New York had been completely humbled, outmoded by containerization – a technology which offered seamlessly integrated freight distribution across sea, rail, and road, but at a price of wholescale adoption of it and the new equipment produced to carry it. The Box details shipping containers’ genesis, their rise in use, and the effects of their adoption, like greater concentration of shipping interests into a few big lines and increased government involvement in the service – both results of the amount of resources needed to earn  greater profit-by-volume.  The account is sometimes dry (there’s a considerable section on the problems of finding just the right corner fittings for the Box), but enlivened by some of its personalities – especially Malcolm McLean, the truck driver who introduced containers in the United States because it allowed him to bypass his competitors. An unruly risk-taker, McLean appears throughout the volume, which almost chronicles his taking over world trade: every time containers made prodigious advances, like becoming the American standard or moving into international routes, he was there. (The fact that the entire volume of traffic between the United States and Britain could be handled by five container ships should give modern readers an idea of how containerization allowed a few large lines to begin dominating the industry. Container ship lines are truly the 'big box' stores of the seas.)  To  begin appreciating how  world-unifying globalized trade began, look no further than The Box.

Santa and Pete

Santa and Pete: A Novel of Christmas Present and Past
© 1998 Christopher Moore and Pamela Johnson
176 pages

Seven year-old Terrence has no interest in spending his Saturdays keeping his elderly grandfather company while the older man runs his bus route.Who wants to be cooped up on a bus listening to an old man's stories when he could be outside playing? And the stories don't even make sense; they're about a place called New Amsterdam, a place grandpa seems to see when he looks out the window and sees New York. Instead of skyscrapers and apartment complexes, Terrence's grandfather acts as though he lives in a 17th century harbor town, where immigrants throughout Europe and Africa lived together and tried to make a world for themselves. Terrence can't help but notice the way passengers respond to the stories, though -- they lean forward, eyes bright, minds captivated by the way their driver can connect them with the past. And one snowy Christmas eve, when the bus breaks down in a blizzard, they are forced to wait -- but in the meantime, break out snacks from their shopping and hunker down while they're told the story of a man named St. Nicholas and his good friend Pete.

The story is set in a Christmas long ago, when Nicholas and his friend Peter traveled from the Netherlands to the New World, after hearing that the children there were in distress. They find the town  (New Amsterdam) enduring a poor harvest, a harsh winter, and on the verge of war with the natives. This being a Christmas story, Nicholas and Pete bring hope, peace, and friendship to the town and its perceived foes. Author Christopher Moore (not of Lamb fame) has produced a story that is a fascinating mix of fantasy, legend, and mythic history. I doubt many Americans are familar with the Dutch Christmas mythos, in which St. Nicholas arrives in town accompanied not by elves, but by a black man of Moorish descent named Piet -- or multiple black men. David Sedaris wrote about Christmas in Holland in the sketch, "Six to Eight Black Men". Although Sedaris revels in the absurdest aspects of the legend, here Moore presents the story of the two men in all seriousness. Their close friendship in a time of ethnic conflict should speak to American audiences, and despite playing fast and loose with both history and convention myth, the story itself is a charmer.

The Union Club Mysteries

The Union Club Mysteries
© 1987 Isaac Asimov
210 pages

Evening falls in New York City, and inside the aristocratic Union Club, four gentlemen sit ensconced in their usual chairs in the club library. Three talk softly among themselves while a fourth -- an older gentleman with a white, puffy mustache -- seems to doze. But their conversation makes a turn that interests his still-awake ears, his somnolent mind springs to life, and he takes a sip of his scotch and soda. Griswold has awoken, and that last bit of conversation reminds him of a story...

So begin thirty evenings inside the Union Club, wherein Griswold -- formerly in the employ of a shadowy government Department which gave him plentiful opportunities to solve domestic mysteries and international espionage plots -- regales or abuses his dining comrades with a mystery from his life, a story which he expects them to solve by the end.  If they do not -- and they never do -- he faithfully explains the solution.  Although the setting seems similar to the Black Widowers -- a stag club who meet once a month for conversation and drinks -- Griswold's tales are much shorter, and the appeal of the stories is different. While Black Widowers stories feature the gentlemen discussing literature, science, history, art, and the like in order to find a solution to a given mystery, here the burden is laid entirely upon the reader, and the solution is often more subjective than in a Widower's story. It's a bit like working a crossword puzzle in that in reading, you must try to think like Asimov, to find some odd angle at which to hang the plot.   The solution's clue is usually obvious, but the trick is  matching Asimov in thinking of why that clue is relevant.

I enjoy little puzzlers like these, and have reading a tale or two at lunch every day since I received the book in the mail. Although the stories aren't nearly as entertaining as the Black Widowers tales, I enjoyed most of the mysteries and even solved a fair few of them. There were a few groaners, but on the whole I'd recommend this to short-mystery or Asimov readers.

The Gangs of New York

The Gangs of New York
© 1927 Herbert Ashbury
368 pages





A few weeks ago I opted to read Herbert Ashbury’s Gangs of New York to see what his writing style might be like. I have a strong interest in city life during the late 19th century, so a book set in that time period such as Gangs of New York is right up my alley.  The book was initially published in 1927, meaning before Prohibition and before organized crime as Americans perceive it in the form of the Mafia. The gangs presented in this book pretend to no sophistication: they are street brawlers who delight in a good fight as much as they do in making money.  Some of these crawlers make for interesting characters, like the hood who was never seen without a book in his pocket and who thought Herbert Spencer particularly good reading.

As I started in, I quickly realized that Ashbury’s work wasn’t the most readable book I’d ever picked up. It’s full of interesting information, but the information is presented as-is:  there’s little narrative here, which hurts the book. Even the slightest of narratives doesn’t just make the book easier or more “fun” for the reader: it helps the book communicate. In the chapter on tong wars in Chinatown, for instance, Ashbury tells what happens, but he does not explain what the tongs were or how they fit into immigrant society. Jerry Flamm did this in Good Life in Hard Times: San Francisco’s Twenties and Thirties, and as a result I learned more in Flamm’s brief chapter on how San Francisco police officers broke the tongs of their day than in Ashbury’s longer chapter on tong history. The same is true of the gangs comprised of European immigrants: while Ashbury writes on what they did, he offers no explanation as to why they arose, although the reader can draw his or her own ideas out if they’re creative enough.

Because of this weakness, I wouldn’t recommend this for readers just starting to explore this period. The book’s genuine wealth of information -- including varied and bizarre characters and stories -- is of value to a more read student of the period, and it is to those readers I would recommend this work. Ashbury’s tone betrays the time in which he wrote this: his criticism often employs religious language, giving it an expressly moralistic flavor which I found more amusing than anything else. Ashbury’s words often have a shadow of racism about them, and they are particularly dark in the chapter on the tongs of Chinatown.

The book thus has its problems, but given the wealth of information here, is still very much useful to a student of the period. The book covers nearly a hundred years of history, and I was able to see the gangs evolve from collections of uniformed hoods who liked brawling to political bully-boys and “businessmen”.  Ashbury does a good job of portraying how bleak a place late-19th century New York was, and I think I leave the book more knowledgeable for having read it. Given that it’s such a straightforward account -- an expanded police blotter -- this will be better appreciated by those with more background knowledge.

Marx in Soho

Marx in Soho

© 1999 Howard Zinn

88 pages

"Oh, ja -- 'capitalism has triumphed!' -- but over whom?" - Marx, Marx in Soho

Although The Zinn Reader held a near-monopoly on my attention last week, there was a brief thirty-minute timeframe in which I visted my post box, discovered to my happy surprise that a book had come in early, and excitedly read through it. As you might guess from those comments, Marx in Soho is not a lengthy work: it is not even a book in the usual sense, but a play written by Howard Zinn. I came to Marx in Soho by the same means I came to The Zinn Reader:  You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train,  a documentary on Zinn's life.  Film from a production of Zinn's speculative play in which Karl Marx visits the present day from the "beyond" featured in the movies, and it intrigued me enough that I started looking for recordings on YouTube. Those were well-done enough to merit my looking for the book, which I did.

As said, the play's premise is one of speculative fiction. Karl Marx, annoyed that his name and life's work are being slandered in the modern world, is able to badger the Powers that Be into letting him visit the living world just for one hour -- although, due to a bureacratic mix-up, he finds himself in Soho, New York instead of Soho, England. The play is a monolouge, although we hear from other characters through Marx's reflectings on the past. Most of his attention is focused firmly on the present, as he admits that his predictions of class revolution and Communism were off, muses on why, and applies his criticisms of capitalism in the 19th century to capitalism in the 20th. Marx is portrayed not as a sage-like Gentleman Scholar in this play, but as an ordinary human who loved his wife and children, endured a bad cough,  turned his home into a salon for the dicussion of economic and political matters, and who is passionate about his work. Zinn's Marx has a sense of humor, sometimes making wry comments to the audience after his more spirited rants have attracted negative attention from "Heaven" -- lightening flashes whenever Marx becomes too animated.

Marx in Soho is a fun little read. It's almost a modern Communist Manifesto, communicating Marx's ideas to a lay audience. It's nowhere near as thorough as the Manifesto, but the 21st century's attention span may be too short to endure even the short work that is the Manifesto.  Marx in Soho is fairly well done -- it's readable, presents the Manifesto's basic tenents, entertains, and humanizes a figure who is more legend than man. My only raised eyebrow comes from Marx speaking in Zinn's voice toward the end.