An important snapshot of the sorry effect of the housing crisis on the environment and society.
Unsettling look at how housing in America amplifies inequality downward, conveying privilege to corporate landlords and misery to the working poor.
Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU, returns to the geography of an earlier book about Disney’s planned town Celebration, in central Florida. As Celebration aged into unanticipated crises, the housing in the region has become ever more problematic. “Variants of this affliction had spread all across working-class Osceola County,” he writes, “soon to be pinpointed as the place with the least amount of affordable low-income housing per capita in the entire United States.” The author notes how many workers in the tourism industry are hard-pressed to find affordable housing or are already homeless, living in dilapidated motels or forest encampments. He first examines the long shadow of the 2008 housing bubble, pointing out that while homeowners were not bailed out, private equity firms snapped up numerous foreclosures, leading to increased rents and mismanagement. Even Disney sold Celebration’s downtown to a venture capital firm with “no record of managing town centers nor any vested interest in maintaining the high maintenance standards set by the brand-conscious developer.” Ross emphasizes the human cost, chronicling his interactions with countless individuals barely holding on to shelter. The author contrasts the working-class desperation of the motel district with the growth of posh short-term rental homes for the affluent. “The motel owners are an easy target,” he writes, “but it would be a mistake to think that the growth of vacation homes is disconnected from the housing distress further along the corridor” Although sections dealing with the predatory economics of the housing market can be dry, the author’s focus on details of place and real peoples’ lives makes for poignant, engaging reading, punctuating the conclusion that “alternatives to the market delivery model for housing are desperately needed.”
An important snapshot of the sorry effect of the housing crisis on the environment and society.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-80422-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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