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Told from two generations later and a world apart, Shane White's North Country (NBM; 96 pages; $14) seems superficially completely different from The Quitter. Where Pekar explores the life of a Jewish immigrant's son in post-WWII urban America, White's experience is that of an nth-generation non-denominational Christian growing up as the child of Vietnam-era parents in the farmland of upstate New York. In spite of this, both books share themes of violence, the legacy of parental neglect, and the power of personal expression to move people beyond their crushing circumstances. For a first...
Also baptized Catholic, Jimmy was born into a family of Scientologists. His parents, disaffected with traditional religion, had joined the Church in the 1970s, part of an early wave of American converts. L. Ron Hubbard started the religion in the late 1950s, and it was soon adopted by urban intellectuals and curious others in Washington D.C., New York, and Los Angeles. Today, there are around 77,000 practitioners in the United States, according to the City University of New York’s 2004 American Religious Identification Survey. (By way of comparison, the same survey reports that there are around...
...public infrastructures, like roads, and take a few simple steps to empower victims, helping individuals to help themselves. To its credit, the Bush administration has taken some steps in the right direction. Regulatory relief, which encourages entrepreneurship and reduces the cost of rebuilding, will help. So will the innovative Urban Homesteading Act, which, by allowing victims to gain title to federal land, could be a successful low-income housing program that actually builds communities instead of housing projects...
Hurricanes Rita and Katrina will both be remembered for their crowded human calamities: the gridlocked escape from Houston, the suffering at the Superdome. But in dozens of small towns dug into the fragile ecosystems of the coastal marshes, far from the urban meltdowns, communities weren't just inflamed, they were annihilated. In Cameron Parish, La., along the border with Texas, Rita washed towns like Creole, Oak Grove and Grand Chenier into the sea. In neighboring Vermilion Parish, the residents of Pecan Island returned to find little more than a mile-wide debris field choked with dead marsh grasses...
Every year our hypocrisy grows as we fight against measures that would equalize our school system—an infrastructure that funnels substanially more funding for the schools in wealthy neighborhoods, leaving schools in poorer areas, be they urban, suburban, or rural, to literally rot away. Johnathan Kozol’s book Savage Inequalities makes this argument, graphically illustrating the funding discrepancies with stories of children being forced to learn in completely racially segregated schools, in closets and bathrooms, in condemned buildings, or with outdated books. But the most upsetting part of Kozol’s book isn?...