Cleanup on Aisle Five by Ann Larson

CLEANUP ON AISLE FIVE by Ann Larson is an eye-opening tale of “Essential Work, Poverty Wages, and the View from Behind the Supermarket Register.” We have all stood in line at the supermarket check-out, often frustrated with the wait and the poor quality of packing. Larson encourages readers to take another perspective by relating her own COVID-era experiences as a worker and those of her colleagues. She certainly made me feel more compassionate towards the frontline supermarket employees, standing in place for hours on end and repetitively swiping products past a scanner. Yet, it is worth pointing out that Larson takes an activist perspective and writes, “it was as an outsider that I saw how the supermarket as an institution is a window into larger social divisions and injustices.” She notes, for example, that “many grocery workers are food insecure” and “being perpetually too tired to cook was one of the ironies of working at the supermarket.” And her statistics on dental care, tooth pain, and missing teeth (“One-quarter of adults in the United States over the age of 65 are missing all of their teeth and our country has one of the highest rates of toothlessness in the world”) are surprising and class related. CLEANUP ON AISLE FIVE received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. This book deserves attention and could join others (e.g., Evicted, Nickel and Dimed, Maid, or even How May I Help You?) which have been part of our curriculum as students learn to appreciate the struggles of their neighbors. Extensive source notes (approximately fifteen percent of the text) are included.

Everything We Never Had by Randy Ribay

EVERYTHING WE NEVER HAD by Randy Ribay (Patron Saints of Nothing, a National Book Award finalist) is told in multiple perspectives across four generations of a Filipino-American family. The earliest action takes place in 1930 Watsonville, California where Francisco, a recent immigrant, has to deal with violence, prejudice, and his disappointment at life in America. In 1965 Stockton, California, readers meet Emil, Francisco’s son, a dutiful student and hard-working employee at his aunt’s restaurant. He resents his labor organizer father and vows to make his own way. Then there is 1983 Denver, Colorado where Chris yearns to play football but can’t ever live up to the standards of his demanding father, Emil. Chris rebels as he discovers a love of history and pursues his own interests as a teacher. His son, named Enrique Lorenzo and called Enzo, grows up in 2020 Philadelphia, coping with anxiety, the pandemic, and continuing discrimination. Once again, Ribay offers so much to unpack – immigrant feelings, generational conflict, parenting styles, and plenty of anger. Students will relate to the stories of each of these characters as a young man and may be intrigued by the way the societal environment and the individual choices of each character impacts the next generation. The novel does flip back and forth between time periods and this may be difficult for some students, but EVERYTHING WE NEVER HAD received multiple starred reviews, including from Booklist, Kirkus (“many heartwarming and heartbreaking moments offer deep insights into intergenerational patterns”), Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal. The book contains a list of recommended resources, both print and online like Asian Mental Health Collective, Filipino American National Historical Society, Stop AAPI Hate, and United Farm Workers. Interested previewers can listen to an excerpt on the publisher’s website.

Reunion by Elise Juska

REUNION by Elise Juska (The Blessings) focuses on three friends who are returning to Maine for their 25th college reunion which has been postponed for a year due to the COVID pandemic. Hope is the most level-headed, but she has struggled (“you can only do what you can do”) to meet the needs of her college age daughter, special needs son, and increasingly distant husband who faced the COVID challenges posed to a higher education administrator. Adam, a carefree spirit while in college, has become interested in environmental sciences and has two young boys, but his wife is sadly obsessed and afraid for the state of the physical world. Finally, there’s Polly who, as a single Mom, raised Jonah, a now 18-year-old troubled youth interested in nature and photography. Out of practice in social skills due to the recent lockdowns and having lost the closeness of their college years, Hope, Adam, and Polly find their relationship strained – especially when some long-ago secrets come to light. REUNION is an introspective reflection on what friendship means and the role of family. As Polly muses, “the past year had narrowed that knowledge to a fine point. Your child's happiness: the only thing that mattered and yet how little control over it any parent had.” Booklist says, “a delightful case for reconnecting with the people who knew you when you barely knew yourself.” 

Other Rivers by Peter Hessler

OTHER RIVERS by Peter Hessler is subtitled “A Chinese Education.” Hessler is a staff writer at the New Yorker and has written several other award-winning travel texts. He has lived and worked in China over many years and this text describes the changes he sees given the roughly twenty years which have passed between his initial time in Beijing (2000 to 2007) and time in Chengdu (2019 to 2021). OTHER RIVERS offers an insightful perspective on the lives of many of Hessler’s former and current students and there is much here about what he learned while teaching, too. Hessler is particularly effective in evoking emotion, partly due to the excerpts of student writings which he includes. COVID was active during his second stint in China and Hessler explores and relates the Chinese societal response, detailing the activities and restrictions in Wuhan, even his correspondence with a pharmacist there. OTHER RIVERS received starred reviews from Booklist and Publishers Weekly.

Economics and history ... describing America...

I was reflecting on today’s Iowa caucuses and the current economy after reading an excellent Guest Opinion and analysis in The New York Times. That led me to comment on these texts:

THE PHOENIX ECONOMY by Felix Salmon was published in May 2023. Salmon, the chief financial correspondent at Axios, describes “Work, Life, and Money in the New Not Normal.” He spends a great deal of time noting the far-reaching impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic and argues, for example that “Covid broke time,” impacting our regular habits (daily commute, annual family visits, shopping trips) in a disconcerting manner. The economic impacts, of course, were far-ranging, too, (e.g., a deep but short recession in 2020; use of Zoom and Slack; investment timeframe). Salmon writes in an engaging manner and his commentary, especially on how investment strategies and styles differ by generation (building on Kevin Roose’s concept of from ladders to trampolines) is informative and though-provoking. As we all acclimate to a post-Covid environment, this text offers a terrific (if triggering) retrospective. THE PHOENIX ECONOMY is the Winner of the 2023 SABEW (an association of business journalists) Best in Business Book Award for Investing and Personal Finance. This text was also profiled and summarized by The Next Big Idea Club.

THE VELVET ROPE ECONOMY by Nelson D. Schwartz was originally published in March 2020, and therefore probably did not get as much attention as it would have had at other times. Schwartz, a business reporter at The New York Times with close to two decades of experience, discusses “How Inequality Became Big Business,” a topic which certainly features in analyses of voting patterns and reactions to candidates. In fact, Schwartz concludes the text by writing “it's up to all of us -- including those well ensconced inside the velvet rope -- to create a less segmented society, where Americans from different walks of life actually meet one another and find common ground.” His chapters look at experiences inside (envy, exclusivity, ease, access, and security) and outside (exclusion, division, and isolation) by sharing numerous examples across industries. Perhaps one of the most vivid is the literal separation at sporting venues like the new Yankee Stadium which limits access and getting autographs to certain ticket holders. While looking at product differentiation and capacity constraints, Schwartz points to travel, healthcare, and education, saying, “as the public sector is replaced by private services aimed at the elite, the very foundation of the republic is eroded.” THE VELVET ROPE ECONOMY is well-researched, and notes represent roughly ten percent of the text. Schwartz’s examples tend to be domestic ones, but internationally, as was stated more recently on The Conversation web site: “Globally, inequality is so extreme that the world’s 10 richest men possess more wealth than the 3.1 billion poorest people, Oxfam has calculated.” Think about it.

Published in 2020, PROMISED LAND by David Stebenne chronicles “How the Rise of the Middle Class Transformed America, 1929-1968.” Stebenne, a lawyer and Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University, documents change across those four decades through an historical lens so as to tell “the story of how and why that transformation [to a predominately middle-class nation] came about, what life was like during the heyday of the middle class, and why, beginning in the later 1960s, that process slowed down and eventually stopped.” He discusses a “state of mind” and how the middle class “prized a sense of belonging, taking pride in their families, neighborhoods, communities, and country” which echoes the work of other scholars such as Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, Our Children or, perhaps, even Upswing. In addition to economic characteristics, Stebenne points to demographic (race and gender), geographic, and cultural (increase in driving, radio, television, etc.) factors in a readily accessible way. Of help to interested researchers (especially AP US students), roughly twenty percent of PROMISED LAND is devoted to notes and bibliographic references.

American Deadline ... reporting from four news-starved towns

AMERICAN DEADLINE by Greg Glassner, Charles Richardson, Sandra Sanchez, and Jason Togyer is a timely text about “Reporting from Four News-Starved Towns in the Trump Era.” Here, four journalists have collaborated with Columbia Journalism School to document their thoughts throughout much of 2020. The initial idea was that the election would be a major story and that this text could perhaps provide insight about smaller towns and cities in a way that seemed lacking in 2016. Well, the main story of 2020 turned into COVID and this project evolved. It is interesting to see the reflections from such a diverse group of places, the first two of which have lost their local papers while the other two have shrunk: McKeesport, Pennsylvania, is near Pittsburgh having lost many manufacturing jobs; Bowling Green, Virginia, largely rural and estranged from the state’s blue cities; McAllen, Texas, dealing with the border crisis; and Macon, Georgia, still dealing with “America’s troubled reckoning with race.” Glassner et al. provide some insights, but a more thorough summary of patterns (and possible next steps?) would have been a helpful addition.

The loss of local journalism is a dire situation. A few years ago, Art Cullen told an impressive story in Storm Lake while the University of North Carolina, in conjunction with The Knight Foundation, developed a comprehensive database on The Expanding News Desert which is itself referenced in AMERICAN DEADLINE. The News Literacy Project also attempts to fill a gap with some excellent Resources for Educators. If we do not have an educated citizenry who can agree on basic facts, then attempts at compromise and governance will become even more fraught.

Added note: Only recently, The New York Times published “It’s Not a Good Sign When People Who Don’t Pay for News Have So Little to Choose From.” Equally worrisome may be the attempts by attorney generals from Missouri and Louisiana to quell efforts to combat disinformation campaigns: see articles in New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

The Body in the Web by Katherine Hall Page

Enjoy a diverting read from a long-running cozy series: THE BODY IN THE WEB by Katherine Hall Page is the latest Faith Fairchild mystery. This one takes place during COVID with Faith needing to pivot her catering business to a service for delivering meals to locked down residents of Aleford, Massachusetts. Her children, Ben and Amy, are respectively now in college and finishing high school, so they able assistants, working around their remote schooling schedules. It does take a while for a body to appear, but readers will likely suspect which character will be the victim and may appreciate the anticipation. The author provides some surprises as to the murderer and also ensures that Faith’s persistence in tracking down that person is much in evidence. THE BODY IN THE WEB received a starred review from Library Journal (“The reader and the victim are both trapped in a web in this skillful combination of mystery and pandemic story”).

Unraveling by Peggy Orenstein

I loved UNRAVELING by Peggy Orenstein. It is her story of “What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World's Ugliest Sweater,” but really it is filled with observations about coping with the pandemic and about the importance of being open and curious about new experiences.  I found this book to be a source of solace and I spun the reading over a few weeks, learning about shearing, dye making, and knitting. Those relatively ancient skills somehow reinforced the idea that modern day readers would also manage to cope and they could begin with some deep breaths and a slower pace. I thoroughly enjoyed turning to Orenstein’s antics at the end of each day and found her wordplay entertaining, too: “We hang by threads, we lose the thread, we pick up the thread, we thread through crowds … Textile analogies loom large in our lives.” It is clear she researched extensively and UNRAVELING includes a 3 page selected bibliography. Orenstein herself commented, “What I didn’t expect was all I’d discover about how clothing has shaped civilization, class, culture, power, or its pivotal role in our environmental future.” Readers, too, will learn much. Highly recommended.

The Stolen Year by Anya Kamenetz

I am surprised and disappointed at the initial very negative tone in THE STOLEN YEAR by Anya Kamenetz, a former education correspondent for NPR.  Although she subtitled the book “How COVID Changed Children's Lives, and Where We Go Now,” she argues that the impact of COVID was that the “the 150-year-old social contract of public schooling in America – you must show up, we must educate you – was broken.” This feels like a well-known tale of woe (lost food service, no routine, limited social interaction) and only sporadic acknowledgement of what was accomplished (Zoom … “went from hosting ten million people daily in December 2019 to two hundred million in March 2020”). Kamenetz writes more about the 1930s Works Progress Administration than she does about state boards of education and local administrators, making little effort to hold them accountable even though they are the ones who kept moving goalposts (class length and daily schedules), who reduced rigor for millions of students (no grades and flexible deadlines) and did not do enough to actively encourage attendance (e.g., Los Angeles school district reported that on an average Spring day in 2020 “only about 36 percent of middle and high school students participated in online learning”). I have vivid memories of spending inordinate amounts of time tracking down students who simply did not do the work and who seemed to have no incentive to create a make-up plan. Teachers were expected to add this task to an already overflowing to do list where learning more effective and engaging use of new technology could have been a priority.

Kamenetz does describe events chronologically and that, along with the first person narratives she includes, will be helpful to future scholars (as will the notes section that comprises roughly twenty percent of the text). Citing alarming statistics from the APA, she also devotes an entire chapter to mental health, a critical aspect that continues to impact students. Again, there was very little central coordination – with over $200 billion allocated to schools from the Trump and Biden administrations, it seems like exemplary programs could have been identified and scaled up. In her concluding chapter, Kamenetz mentions some broader examples: MIT’s Justin Reich highlighting themes of “healing, community, and humanity;” Oakland Reach and its community activism; Guilford County, North Carolina’s increased graduation rate. She stresses patterns of strong relationships and student agency – elements of choice – in the curriculum. Ultimately, Kamenetz advocates for “the need to put children at the center of our decision making in a way we never have before in this country.” A laudable goal that requires a significant mindset shift. If we repeatedly could not put students first during the height of the pandemic, why think we are capable of doing so now?