Surviving on $2 per day.

I'm reminded of Larry Flynt's argument that war, not sex, is the ultimate obscenity. It may be time to broaden his definition a tad.

‘$2.00 a Day,’ by Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer ... book review by William Julius Wilson (New York Times)

... There are various strategies that the $2-a-day poor use to survive — from taking advantage of public libraries, food pantries and homeless shelters to collecting aluminum cans and donating plasma for cash. Still, in small Delta towns “the nearest food pantry is often miles away, despite the sky-high poverty.” SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) constitutes the only real safety net program available to the truly destitute — but it cannot be used to pay the rent. “While SNAP may stave off some hardship,” the authors write, “it doesn’t help families exit the trap of extreme destitution like cash might.”

All of the $2-a-day families highlighted by Edin and Shaefer have had to double up with kin and friends at various times because their earnings were insufficient to maintain their own home. Some had to endure verbal, physical and sexual abuse in these dwellings, and the ensuing trauma sometimes precipitated a family’s fall into severe poverty.

This essential book is a call to action, and one hopes it will accomplish what ­Michael Harrington’s “The Other America” achieved in the 1960s — arousing both the nation’s consciousness and conscience about the plight of a growing number of invisible citizens. The rise of such absolute poverty since the passage of welfare reform belies all the categorical talk about opportunity and the American dream.

A book about Newark's attempt to rebuild its schools.

The reviewer calls it "one of the most important books on education to come along in years. It serves as a kind of corrective to the dominant narrative of school reformers across the country."

I'll ask two serious questions, because I don't know the answers.

When was the last time a City Hall team in New Albany got genuinely involved in matters of public education?

Conversely, when did school administration last take a serious interest in the city's management?

Yes, the mayor's wife is a principal, so I don't doubt there is interest. School administration cultivates an aura of lofty distance, but I'm equally confident that someone probably there cares how the city is run.

However, the public appearance is one of non-cooperation on the part of both "sides."

Is this accurate? Let me know what you think.

‘The Prize,’ by Dale Russakoff, a book review by Alex Kotlowitz (New York Times)

In America, education was long seen as the great equalizer, but that has become mostly myth. So, over the past decade, there has been a vigorous effort to fortify and rebuild our schools, and in this there is a recognition that we have failed our children, especially those living in poverty, those for whom education could — and should — be transformational. From Chicago to New Orleans, school reform has been engineered by the well heeled and well connected — from hedge fund managers to corporate heads to directors of foundations — who believe that with the right kind of teachers and pedagogy, and with a ­business-like administration, schooling can trump the daily burdens and indignities of growing up poor. “No excuses” has become the rallying cry of the reformers.

Along comes Dale Russakoff’s “The Prize,” a brilliantly reported behind-the-scenes account of one city’s attempt to right its failing public schools. When Russakoff began reporting this book in 2010, fewer than 40 percent of the students in the third through eighth grades in Newark, N.J., were reading or doing math at grade level — and nearly half of the system’s students dropped out before graduating. The schools were so broken that the state had taken them over. Something needed to be done. From this rubble emerged an exciting if not unusual partnership between three individuals who couldn’t have been more different from one another. The city’s black Democratic mayor, the charismatic and ambitious Cory Booker, joined hands with the state’s blustery and ambitious white Republican governor, Chris Christie, to reimagine Newark’s schools. Together, they enlisted Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who pledged a whopping $100 million — to be matched by another $100 million, which the city raised, mostly from foundations and private individuals. It was such an extraordinary gift that Zuckerberg, with Booker and Christie by his side, announced it on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” As Russakoff writes: “Their stated goal was not to repair education in Newark but to develop a model for saving it in all of urban America.” This is what makes “The Prize” essential reading. Newark was to be our compass for school reform.

Numerous Romneys, real and imagined.

Just barely, I'm old enough to remember George W. Romney's name in the 1968 presidential scrum, but little else about Mitt's father. After reading a bit, I conclude that in this case, father is a far more compelling figure than son. Republicanism of the elder Romney's variety seems to have been purged from the body politic.

Romney vs. Romney: ‘The Real Romney,’ by Michael Kranish and Scott Helman ... reviewed by Geoffrey Kabaservice (New York Times Sunday Book Review)

... The argument that Romney is not a moderate at heart emerges most clearly in the book’s comparisons between him and his father, who was a leader of the moderate wing of the Republican Party in the 1960s and ’70s. This is ironic, since Mitt has said he “grew up idolizing” his father, and the authors imply that his motivation for wanting to be president is “avenging his father’s loss” in 1968. But Romney appears to have little in common politically with his father, and his candidacy in no way aims to uphold the moderate legacy his father embodied.

George Romney was born into exile and raised in poverty, and he worked his way to prosperity in the automobile industry. As chairman of the American Motors Corporation, he was wealthy but nowhere near as rich as his son became and, unlike his son, was known for refusing bonuses that would have made his income too many multiples of the average worker’s salary. Civil rights for African-Americans was George Romney’s lifelong, passionate cause, undertaken in defiance of his church as well as the conservative wing of his party; Mitt has shown scant inclination to follow his father’s example. Where George saw the dissent and protest of the 1960s as legitimate responses to real social and political problems, Mitt saw only inexplicable disorder and lack of proper deference toward authority.

George Romney governed at a time when Republican moderation meant something. He stood not only for pro-business fiscal conservatism but for civil rights and civil liberties, Republican outreach to minorities and labor, an internationalist but noninterventionist foreign policy, wise public investments in infrastructure and education, and government programs to promote equal opportunities for all Americans. If his son has the courage to champion such positions in the face of conservative opposition within his party, he has given little indication of it in his campaign so far.

For the holiday: "Is World War II Still ‘the Good War’?"

There is far too much of interest in Adam Kirsch's esssay from yesterday's Sunday Book Review at the New York Times, so I'll merely provide the link and isolate one paragraph.

Is World War II Still ‘the Good War’?

... Indeed, the best of the new World War II histories can be seen as attempts to give us, in the year 2011, a more authentic and complete sense of what the war was actually like to those fighting it.

A different view of Churchill.

Definitive assertions of historical "truth" aren’t always trustworthy, not because socialistic subversives like the late Howard Zinn are perversely motivated by spite to puncture those childishly simplistic myths that help us navigate a complicated world, but precisely because the world is so complicated. The ones who insist on reminding us of it are essential, although routinely villified. They're my personal heroes.

Johann Hari's New York Times review of the book, "Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made," by Richard Toye, demonstrates these shades of gray murkiness as they pertain to the familiar hagiography accorded Winston Churchill, succinctly summarized by Hari in this sentence:

“(Churchill) may have been a thug, but he knew a greater thug when he saw one — and we may owe our freedom today to this wrinkle in history.”

The Two Churchills

Winston Churchill is remembered for leading Britain through her finest hour — but what if he also led the country through her most shameful one? What if, in addition to rousing a nation to save the world from the Nazis, he fought for a raw white supremacy and a concentration camp network of his own? This question burns through Richard Toye’s superb, unsettling new history, “Churchill’s Empire” — and is even seeping into the Oval Office.

Development, intervention -- what to write, what not to write.

One passage struck home in this balanced review of what sounds like a must-read for me at some point in the near future.

Bright Continent: 'Africa - Altered States, Ordinary Miracles,' by Nicholas Kristof, New York Times book review

... I’ve thought a good deal about these issues, partly because I’m often a purveyor of columns about war and disaster in Africa, from Darfur to Congo to AIDS in southern Africa. And frankly, it’s discomfiting to feel that I’m helping Africa by exposing such catastrophes, and then have African leaders complain — as they do — that such reporting undermines their access to foreign investment and their ability to expand their economies and overcome poverty.

It's a variation of the theme we grapple with here in New Albany. Do we continue explicating the insanity of what doesn't work right and risk losing the positives, thus scaring away people we're trying to attract?

But don't those people deserve to know what they're getting into before committing to the investment?

Wilbur Larch, among others.

For a quarter-century I’ve been scourged by critics hereabouts on the grounds of presumed communism, atheism – and the worst condemnation of all – humanism.

Communist? Only the most stunted of imaginations could contrive charges of communist sympathies in an entrepreneur and small businessman, and yet this idiocy surfaces again and again. I'm a social democrat in the classic European mold, without a political party in this country to represent me, and so be it; I vote against the fascists, and have a clear conscience.

Atheist? Yes. We can discuss that aspect another time, although I suppose that a rejection of the supernatural leads somewhat naturally (pun intended) to the final slur, that of secular humanism.

Humanist? Absolutely and indeed, and in fact, I subscribe to the following, as worded by the Council for Secular Humanism:

Secular Humanism is a way of thinking and living that aims to bring out the best in people so that all people can have the best in life. Secular humanists reject supernatural and authoritarian beliefs. They affirm that we must take responsibility for our own lives and the communities and world in which we live. Secular humanism emphasizes reason and scientific inquiry, individual freedom and responsibility, human values and compassion, and the need for tolerance and cooperation.

Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness … equality, justice for all … in the here and now, in a world defined far more by gray areas than black and whites connected to the unverifiable … where we must negotiate and compromise with each other in human communities … all these notions underpin my personal conception of humanism. You’re free to disagree.

To me, no one issue better illustrates the struggle for equality on the part of fully half the world’s population than the right of reproductive choice for women. While a woman’s freedom to choose the option of abortion may well represent the extreme component of reproductive choice, a clear majority of Americans believe that it should remain just such a legalized, regulated, and defined option.

I support a woman's right to choose.

Seldom does NAC publish full articles from other sources, but today is an exception.

----

The Abortionist.

THIS COMMON SECRET: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor.

By Susan Wicklund with Alan Kesselheim.

A review in the New York Times Book Review by Eyal Press, a contributing writer at The Nation, and the author of “Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Conflict That Divided America”

One morning in January 1991, Susan Wicklund arrived at work wearing a heavy coat of makeup and a curly auburn wig pulled over her half-inch-long gray hair. It was a get-up worthy of a double agent, and it succeeded in helping Wicklund slip unnoticed across enemy lines, though not without feeling as if she’d stepped into a version of “The Twilight Zone.” “Why do I have to do this?” she scrawled in her journal afterward. “WHY?”

The price of concealment is the central theme of Wicklund’s memoir, “This Common Secret,” which offers a rare glimpse into the life of an abortion provider who, like her dwindling band of peers, learned to don an array of disguises over the course of her tumultuous and peripatetic career. Wicklund grew up in a small community in rural Wisconsin populated by gun owners and deer hunters. She went on to become a reproductive health specialist who helped staff abortion clinics in five states, mostly in the Midwest, places that, by the late 1980s, had become veritable combat zones.

Wicklund’s daughter, Sonja, who contributes an epilogue in which she recalls breaking down every time she learned that another abortion provider had been shot, saw her mother as a pillar of strength who never let the wrath of anti-abortion protesters faze her. As it turns out, the stoic demeanor was as deceptive as the wig. The unstinting pressure — “Wanted” signs bearing her photo posted up around town, throngs of demonstrators amassed outside the places where she worked — often drove Wicklund to tears. She took to carrying a loaded .38-caliber revolver. She watched what she said to strangers, sometimes even to relatives, refusing for years to tell her grandmother she performed abortions out of fear she’d disapprove. When Wicklund finally divulged the secret, her grandmother shared one of her own: at 16, her best friend had gotten pregnant, most likely following an act of incest. She’d tried to help her end the pregnancy with a sharp object, and watched her bleed to death.

“This Common Secret” does not attempt to offer a comprehensive account of the abortion conflict, much less an evenhanded one. Though Wicklund claims to respect those who harbor moral qualms about abortion, her book makes no effort to engage critics of Roe v. Wade. The narrative has a somewhat slapdash feel — a journal entry on one page, a flurry of statistics on the next — and, though recounted in the first person, lacks a distinctive voice, perhaps because the book was written with a co-author.

Yet in setting down her story, Wicklund has done something brave, not only by refusing to cower in the shadows but also by recounting experiences that don’t always fit the conventional pro-choice script. Before receiving her medical training, Wicklund had an abortion herself. She was asked no questions, offered no advice and left the clinic feeling violated. Years later, she terminated the pregnancy of a woman who’d been raped and wanted an abortion. Afterward, Wicklund examined the product of conception and discovered the pregnancy had occurred two weeks earlier, meaning it was not a consequence of the rape. Both she and the patient were horrified.

Opponents of abortion might view such episodes as proof that abortion is evil. For Wicklund, they are what drove and inspired her to help each woman she encountered make an informed, truly independent choice. At a clinic she ran in Montana, this meant placing the emphasis on counseling, which sometimes strengthened a patient’s resolve to terminate her pregnancy and other times led her to reconsider and bear the child instead. Wicklund may never convince the protesters who demonized her that women should be free to make such decisions on their own. But in sharing her secrets, she has shown why there is much honor in having spent a lifetime attempting to ensure they do.

"Food porn" from the the NYT Book Review.

While puttering around the kitchen to prepare a pot of Cincinnati-style chili for Super Bowl Sunday, I picked up a two-week old New York Times Book Review and read something really funny, as reported by Dwight Garner in "TBR: Inside the List":

Michael Pollan’s slim new book, “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,” enters the nonfiction list at No. 1. It’s Pollan’s third book to appear here in hardcover, after “The Botany of Desire” (2001) and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” (2006). On NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” a few weeks ago, Pollan deplored the “heroic” cooking on many food shows.

“They make it look really hard,” he said. “You know, it’s like watching too much pornography. You think that that’s how sex is done, and it’s kind of intimidating.”

Nothing heroic about chopping two onions, opening a few cans, adding spices and a beer, and dumping all of it into a pot to simmer while I continue reading and sipping tea.

What was that about sex?