Luc Sante's wonderful Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York is in some ways a pendant piece to Up in the Old Hotel. Though Sante's vision is darkLuc Sante's wonderful Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York is in some ways a pendant piece to Up in the Old Hotel. Though Sante's vision is darker, and he has a keener eye for the con, it's as if both he and Mitchell were coming at the material from different angles. Sante is a cultural historian; Mitchell's focus by contrast is more on the individual. But both have a special forcus on the gritty demimonde of the Bowery in the late 19th century and, after its decline, marked by the death of Big Tim Sullivan in 1913 (See "A Sporting Man"), its move to new digs on lower Broadway. Here for instance is a quote that might be right out of Sante's Low Life:
At that time, in 1894, the Bowery was just beginning to go to seed; it was declining as a theatrical street, but its saloons, dance halls, dime museums, gambling rooms, and brothels were still thriving. In that year, in fact, according to a police census, there were eighty-nine drinking establishments on the street, and it is only a mile long." p. 128
The stories -- perhaps profiles is the better term -- are brilliantly written in a straightforward expository style, and often laugh-out-loud funny. "Lady Olga," for instance, is a profile of circus sideshow bearded lady Jane Barnell in her sixty-ninth year. "Professor Sea Gull" is about the inimitable Joe Gould, that woebegone lecturer of the streets and coffee houses (when someone else was paying), about whom Mitchell would later write a longer piece, "Joe Gould's Secret," also included here. Mitchell's summary of Gould's nine-million word treatise "An Oral History of Our Time" (unpublished) is fascinating and alone worth reading, yet the essay offers so much more.
In many essays, it's as if Mitchell is simply taking testimony. "The Gypsy Women" is mostly a verbatim talk that was given to the author and two novice NYPD detectives by the longtime Commander of the Pickpocket and Confidence Squad. In "The Deaf-Mute Club" he relates a visit to that self-same club where he exchanged long handwritten notes with the club's president, which are transcribed without interruption. In one essay we learn of the penniless drifter who wrote improvised checks on paper bags for many thousands of dollars to kind people who'd helped him; and the man who couldn't abide swearing and so started the Anti-Profanity League in 1901.
Mitchell, like Whitman, celebrates the individual, and like the great poet he has a penchant for the catalog, which he uses to brilliant effect. His rhythms, moreover, his prosody, can be downright sonorous. He has a fantastic ear for colloquial speech and the writing is jam-packed with vivid description, yet never overly freighted.
What's tremendously cool for me as a New Yorker is the sense of place I get from the essays. All the streets I've walked for so many years -- past McSorley's Ale House off Cooper Square, the old Police Headquarters on Centre St. and so on -- take on rich historical depth. I can see now how Mitchell's book will serve as a nice stepping stone to Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Burrows and Wallace, a doorstop that's been unread on my shelf for too long. ...more
A gem of a memoir. Richer than Spielberg's film (though he did an excellent job with the material). Mesmerizing from start to finish.A gem of a memoir. Richer than Spielberg's film (though he did an excellent job with the material). Mesmerizing from start to finish....more
The mirror test for dolphins (and elephants) demonstraTAIJIとFUTO JAPANの陸上でのイルカの季節的な移動を停止する。請願書に署名してください。ありがとうございました。savedolphins.eii.org/campaigns/sjd
The mirror test for dolphins (and elephants) demonstrates their ability to recognize a live image of themselves, thus proving the animal’s self-consciousness, a sign of advanced cognition. Dolphins are actually the only animals on earth who have brains bigger than ourselves. The book is an overview of recent research into dolphin cognition. It’s a really decently written popular science title. The grounding story surveys biologist Diana Reiss's fascinating thirty years of research into the spectacularly inquisitive minds of bottlenose dolphins. She’s emotional here in a way that she can't be in her data-driven scientific papers— she’s written many—and the anecdotes are astonishing. I especially liked the brief history of dolphin-human interactions from antiquity to the present day. Brief online videos augment the text. Moreover, the book contains a conservation argument the world desperately needs to hear.
A highly readable account of four instances of human folly over the last 2800 years. These include the Trojans's unaccountable bringing of the Trojan A highly readable account of four instances of human folly over the last 2800 years. These include the Trojans's unaccountable bringing of the Trojan horse into Troy; the transgressions of the Renaissance Popes which brought on the Reformation; the loss by Britain of the American colonies; and America's own pointless war in Vietnam. The last section reminds me very much of Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie, which was written several years later than Tuchman's narrative. Her book is vivid, clear, unfussy, with just the right density of diction. It never flags. Highly recommended....more
Excellent biography. Herr Marx was a nasty motherfucker. If you did not agree with him, he vilified you. The man was no scholar. He was a polemicist. Excellent biography. Herr Marx was a nasty motherfucker. If you did not agree with him, he vilified you. The man was no scholar. He was a polemicist. He was an economic determinist, a crackpot with dubious math skills. The book is terrific. It is not a critical biography. Author Sperber has his hands full simply taking Marx's fragmented and jumbled oeuvre and making some sense of it. The reader in many instances becomes more enlightened than Lenin ever could have been, not to mention Kropotkin or Trotsky. Their view of the great man's thought was grossly distorted in comparison to the sharp overview before us here. Marx belonged to the very bourgeois class that he theorized must be violently eliminated in order to bring about the dictatorship of the proletariat. The book is full of such breathtaking paradoxes. Essential reading if one wants to uncloak the mystery of Marx, who was nothing is not enigmatic, not to mention (often) self-confuting....more
Author Tina Rosenberg never simplifies the immense complexity of the issues which inform her story. If anything, she dives right in, fully immersing hAuthor Tina Rosenberg never simplifies the immense complexity of the issues which inform her story. If anything, she dives right in, fully immersing her reader in the formidable challenges the three states— Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany—faced in their rocky transition from communism to democracy just after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The question the book raises is who is to blame for the crimes of the communist era and who should be punished? Scenes of great political or legal or social complexity are described until the reader begins to feel the earth shifting underfoot, the tale is so dense, but then comes a gradually dawning clarity. In this sense the book reminds me—not in its diction or style so much as in its relentless intellectual rigor—of V.S. Naipaul at his best. This is the highest praise I can offer any writer. I particularly want to cite Naipaul's two Islam books and the three books on India. The Haunted Land is solid throughout but the penultimate chapter, "The Conversation," in which Stasi personnel and collaborators try to justify their spying on friends and associates, will set your hair on fire. These are absolutely astounding flights of Trumpian thinking. Good grief. Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1995 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1996....more
There's something appealing to me about the bleak and austere. I suppose it is my basically Stoic-Buddhist mindset and its emphasis on daily acknowledThere's something appealing to me about the bleak and austere. I suppose it is my basically Stoic-Buddhist mindset and its emphasis on daily acknowledgement of life's fleetingness—memento mori. I've been a keen reader of Holocaust histories and memoirs for some time: Primo Levi of course but also Robert Jay Lifton's The Nazi Doctors and Christopher R. Browning's Ordinary Men, which is about the lethal Einsaatsgruppen. In time I moved on to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the Russian Gulag. Now I'm in China in the political reeducation camps. My first excursion here was by way of Nien Cheng's incomparable Life and Death in Shanghai. That book starts in 1966, at the outset of the Mao's notorious Cultural Revolution.
Harry Wu's Bitter Winds starts earlier, during Mao's "Great Leap Forward." Mao was a megalomaniac whose ideological boorishness convulsed his nation causing the deaths of tens of million (Seventy million according to June Chang and Jon Halliday in Mao: The Untold Story.)
The Great Leap Forward was the Soviet-style collectivization of China's agricultural sector which produced the famine of 1958-61. Marxist/Leninist theory always had the profound undergirding of an absolute ignorance of market mechanisms. Of course, these mechanisms function whether one ignores them or not. When Mao and his henchmen ignored them he starved to death, just in this 3-year period, roughly (the figure is real but inexact) 40 million of his own countrymen and women.
Harry Wu was a kid in Catholic school in Shanghai in 1949 when the People's Liberation Army defeated Chang Kai Shek and the Nationalists. Harry's father, a rational person, a banker, who could not imagine the reign of wooden-headed ideologues that were about to descend on his nation, decided to stay when Mao took power. Big mistake. Harry's Catholic teachers, seeing the writing on the wall, fled.
In the interregnum, as the Communists took hold of the reins of power, Harry, a smart kid, read in the Party newspaper about his country's need for geologists to discover the raw materials for China's new industrialist future. He was accepted into a five-year program at a new Beijing institute. But academic work, which Harry was very good at, wasn't what was valued at school. What was valued was mindless reiterations of the Party line.
Harry became caught up in Mao's period of Party self-criticism known to us in the West as the "Hundred Flowers Campaign." ("Let a hundred flowers bloom," wrote the Great Helmsman, "and let a hundred schools of thought contend.") This was a trap to get people to incriminate themselves. Millions were so caught and Harry Wu was among them. He was jailed as a counter-revolutionary rightest. No, I'm not sure what that means either. To the Communists in power however it meant that Harry wasn't ideologically acceptable. It meant he had been born into a banker's family and as such was irrevocably tainted.
We in the West have a hard time understanding the Chinese reverence for family. Suffice it to say that millenia of Confucian familial culture, of ancestor worship, and strict adherence to paternal rule had now given way to an ideology in which family was to be jettisoned. Under Soviet-style Communism, which China was busily adopting, breaking from one's family in order to become a true socialist was encouraged. But even In the Soviet Union—see Orlando Figes's The Whisperers—the strides made in this direction were piecemeal. In China the neural-cultural hardwiring was too great. It was almost impossible for the average Chinese to discard family connections. Thus, individual "crimes" became family crimes. In Harry Wu's case--as in the cases of millions of other unfortunates--his family, his brothers, his sisters, his father, his step-mother-- suffered for Harry's crimes, which we in fact a reaction to his father's "crimes."
Poor Harry had come to adulthood in a setting, religious though it might be, which was based on reason. The Communist Party was not based on reason, and being so young in this new atmosphere of bootlicking ideologues, Harry could not learn to lie quickly enough. Sad to say, but his innocence, his inability to dissemble—Harry had been raised to speak the truth—doomed him. He spent the next 19 years undergoing an utterly stupid program of corrective labor. He almost starved to death a number of times. There are scenes of prisoners dropping like flies from starvation that are almost unbearably moving.
The book is a harrowing read. It was co-written with American Carolyn Wakeman after Harry was released and managed to get away to the U.S. Later he went back with Ed Bradley of CBS's 60 Minutes in order to gather footage for an exposé on China's use of prison labor in the manufacture of export products. What we in the West know today about China's long term use of slave labor we owe to Harry Wu, this book, and his groundbreaking television journalism.
Highly recommended, but grim, not for the faint of heart or those living sheltered lives.
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