Gang Leader For A Day - Sudhir Venkatesh

When Sudhir Venkatesh set out to begin his sociology research on the economics of urban poverty at the University of Chicago he could not have known that his embedded work would cross all the lines of academic objectivity and bring him deeply into the lives and dealings of his subjects. Rather than being his work's flaw, Venkatesh's involvement in the  world of the Robert Taylor housing project uncovers not only the economics of urban poverty, but also a divergent, and all-too-invisible world to much of American society. Predictably Venkatesh's experiences open his eyes to many of his own, and society's, misconstrued understandings about what it means to be poor in America.

Gang Leader For A Day is at its most powerful when Venkatesh pushes himself and the reader beyond comfortable assumptions unchallenged in mainstream society. That this book can at times feel so revealing is the strongest testament to America's willful ignorance and tacit - and sometimes overt - paternalistic attitudes towards people who live in poverty, particularly black Americans. That Venkatesh's work is so novel is perhaps the greatest indictment of a political and economic system that does little more than pay lip-service to ensuring equality and fair opportunity for the less fortunate. In its pages we learn the stories of people who are not only ignored by the system, but often have to work against it to ensure their family's survival. In chronicling the continual hustle of people who need to rely on every resource at their disposal to get along, Venkatesh forces any thoughtful and comfortable reader to challenge their assumptions about where our society places value and what we expect of ourselves and others in our attempts to live the good life.

Though meandering at times, Gang Leader For A Day, makes a strong case for a re-examination, not only of the politics and economics of poverty in America, but about our society's willingness to ignore the lives of people who live alongside us every single day. Contentedly drawing a picture of American life that discredits the experience of any people is something we have always done, Venkatesh reminds us that for as long as books like his seem a revelation, we do it still.

The Journey of Crazy Horse - Joseph Marshall III

Striving to communicate the man often obscured by the legend of uncertain history, Joseph Marshall III's biography of Crazy Horse draws upon the oral histories of the Lakota in the hopes of teaching us all more about his ways and life. Central to Marshall's writing is the belief that Crazy Horse was no more or less of a man than anyone else, and that the values and actions he demonstrated are no less relevant today than they were on the plains of the 19th century.

Crazy Horse's life was at once blessed and cursed. A man rooted deeply in the ways of his parents and ancestors, a strong and loyal Lakota, he was nonetheless fated to face perhaps insurmountable odds and witness the destruction of his people's way of life. Though he provided an example for those with eyes to see, not enough Lakota or whites would follow in his footsteps - the decisions and blindness of that time is a legacy that the United States will never fully escape.

Yet Crazy Horse remains in our consciousness as though a bolt of lightning that has once split the sky. Brilliant and luminescent it was tragically an all-too-brief radiance imprinted upon our collective consciousness. Yet if we take the time to reflect upon that brilliance there is much to learn about the world, the way to live, and ourselves. Such lives can be a gift to all people - if we are ready to accept it. Crazy Horse was a far from perfect man, and perhaps he helped to lead his people to their demise. We will never know if, had he acted differently, things would have been different for his people. But if he were perfect his life would have nothing to teach us. That he was flawed and all-too-human remains his greatest gift, not only to the Lakota, but to us all. That we may each walk in his ways is blessing. As he is remembered, his journey begins anew.

The Gulag Archipelago I & II - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"Do not pursue what is illusory - property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life - don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn for happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don't claw your insides. If your back isn't broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes can see, and if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart - and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well."


While the Soviet Era has ended and the Gulags and repressive regimes have been - ostensibly - dissolved, what Solzhenitsyn has left us with are questions about our own humanity and how societies get to a place where the people are seen as their own worst enemy. The first two parts of the The Gulag Archipelago trace the manner in which the Soviet Union grew its police state following the Russian Revolution and throughout Stalin's rule; how laws were passed to systematically limit dissension and control the populous through unapologetic policies of terror. For someone who has a limited knowledge of Russian history much of the historical aspects were obtuse and required a better background than I had. What these details serve to illuminate is the sheer mass of people whose lives were ended - both figuratively and literally - by the seemingly schizophrenic policies and practices of the Soviet rulers and police state to ensure a continued hold on power. Using the metaphor of a sewer system Solzhenitsyn leads us to wonder if the Russian state could have survived as long as it did without employing such vast numbers of the population in the prison system and without extracting essentially free labor from millions of its own citizens.

Where the work shines is in Solzhenitsyn's focus on the details of prison life. From arrest through incarceration the writing gives the necessary human touches so that the reader can easily place themselves within the prison walls and wonder at their own humanity. I could not help but wonder not only how I would have acted as prisoner, but also as a guard or citizen in such a regime of terror. Once this projection takes place it is hard to believe that Russian citizens were any more or less human than ourselves and wonder at our own capacities. Would each of us be a political prisoner? An interrogator? A guard? A caring bystander who forwards mail? Or a thief abusing, raping and taking advantage of his fellow prisoner? As difficult as such questions are they are nonetheless crucial as we each puzzle over our own humanity and what it means to be human and humane to those around us.

God: A Biography - Jack Miles

What makes God god-like? What sort of "person" is God? Examining the Tanakh, Jack Miles sets out to create an analysis of the text's central character as a literary protagonist. For Miles the Tanakh - what most westerners would call the Old Testament - is really a story about how God has created and come to interact with the world. Tracing the "life" of this protagonist Miles compelling illuminates not only the story of the Tanakh, but the evolution of the character of God.

Though it may seem an obvious observation, the central aspect of God is that he - and yes the Tanakh is relatively unambiguous about his gender - is alone. There are no other deities with which God has divine adventures nor anything except his own creation to reflect his personage. That we may feel conflicted about God's unity - is this same character not our heavenly father, the destroyer of Pharaoh's armies and the comforter of the sick and afflicted? - reveals the tensions on display in the God of the Tanakh. He is, of course, all of these things, but that only raises the question of how any character who is seemingly so contradictory is able to sustain any measure of cohesion? By making God a character riven by his own multiplicity the Tanakh, Miles writes, takes the form of a great character drama. In essence the reader is always referring every action back to its relationship to God and wondering at his actions, or lack of actions given any situation. With only mankind to expose this characters life, the biography of God thus becomes a story about people's relationship to him. If God strikes us as of differing personages it is because he has been revealed in his relationship to people to play many roles.

As the Bible is the central literary piece of all western civilization, the God of the Bible is our most central, and perhaps our most difficult, character. For believers and non-believers alike, the western referent known as God remains he who it is written created Adam and Eve, destroyed the world in a flood, spoke to Moses on the mountain, brought King David to great power and was confronted by Job in the whirlwind. That these events may or may not have happened is both the province of history and articles of faith. What is inescapable is that the writers of the Tanakh have cast this character across the western world and whether we "believe" or not, his personality infuses our lives. That this personality is complex, multiple, often frustrating and seemingly obtuse is part of the growth and life of God within the Tanakh. It is because of the central role of this work of literature that God also becomes inescapable. Thus our lives exist in the shadow of one main protagonist  who is divided and wrestling with himself.

The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac

Further adventures of life on the road with Kerouac, The Dharma Bums recounts the narrators - Kerouac thinly veiled as Ray Smith - travels and, minor, travails across the front roads and backcountry of America (with some Mexico thrown in). Throughout Kerouac and his companions - most  notably Japhy Ryder/Gary Snyder - hike the mountains of the Sierra, meditate in the backwoods of North Carolina, and sleep in the desert of Arizona all while contemplating the great undifferentiated aesthetic continuum proposed by the mystics of Buddhism.

Primarily the work speaks to a re-investigation of what we consider to be necessary versus what we deem to be sufficient. Kerouac and his fellow dharma bums are in search of the enlightening potentials of raw experience, in the hopes that they may change themselves, and by extension the world. By casting off the extraneous aspects of existence these young, almost entirely male and white, Americans hope to get at the root of what is important in this life. Certainly a laudable, if not sometimes seemingly self-centered, goal.

It is to the great credit of The Dharma Bums that, ostensibly, not much happens within the story. In this way Kerouac conveys that it is the cultivation of a state of mind over the external circumstance that is his purpose. The clarity with which he conveys his realizations - which appear oftentimes fully-formed - and the manner in which he romanticizes certain strains of the life, makes it small wonder that two-plus generation of young men (and to some extent women) have turned to Keruoac's work as part of the American gospel of the sojourner . This is not to denigrate the feelings that Kerouac gives voice too. In some very disconcerting ways The Dharma Bums reads entirely contemporary, with only the question of whether America is a free enough place to consciously cat off into its own lost places in search of something we think no longer exists.

The Meeting of East and West: an inquiry concerning world understanding - F.S.C. Northrup

An overview of the major philosophical considerations forming the foundations of Eastern and Western cultures, F.S.C. Northrup's The Meeting of East and West is an erudite, yet concise and approachable synthesis of the ideas that drive our modern world. Written following the close of World War II, though the work's areas of focus may have changed were it to be written today, its analysis has lost none of its punch.

For Northrup, that which drives cultures can largely be found in their intellectual and conceptual roots, whether the populace writ large could give voice to them or not. Contrasting the empiricism of the differentiated West from the more intuitive, aesthetic continuity of the Orient, Northrup provides moving and convincing overviews able to at once encompass the intellectual difficulties of Locke, the antithetical issues of Marx and the seemingly paradoxical, yet wonderfully explanatory aspects of differentiation and continuity of the Tao or Chit - which he identifies as one in the same. It is no mean feat to be able to explain Hegel's work, let-alone the intellectual legacy he created that was transformed by Kant and Fichte. Northrup not only achieves this, but ties it to German aspects of the good and the state.

The scope that Northrup apprehends is, simply put, staggering. At its conclusion The Meeting of East and West offers its own synthesis of Western and Easter thought in the hopes that we may have a world in which we can understand and positively interact with one another. Whether or not we can achieve the task which Northrup puts us to remains, obviously, unanswered. Certainly his work is an important step to understanding where we fit into the world around us. Northrup's work stimulated my interest at every turn and will drive me to further reading. I cannot remember the last time I finished a work and immediately thought that I should start it again.

Michel Serres - The Troubadour of Knowledge

The closest thing we may get to a pedagogy from French philosopher Michel Serres, The Troubadour of Knowledge aims to describe what Serres calls "the Instructed Third." Variously thought of as a renaissance man, or all-arounder (a person in the vein of Odysseus), Serres' Instructed Third represents a meeting point of learned and novice; someone who willingly crosses over between the familiar and the novel, finding at that moment of transition a point that is at once an arrival and a departure.

 This call is inseparable from his philosophies of multiplicity - that hard and fast definitions of things produce inevitable violence and close-off possibilities. All around us Serres sees an all-encompassing rationality that cannot but lead to violence; by choosing a world in which we must know everything we have traded in trivia for wisdom. Serres calls for the re-emergence of a willing human weakness in the face of destructive strength. For Serres it is crucial that we are people of multiplicity, of equi-valence.

 To be all these things Serres says we must rend ourselves from what is easy and simple. Many great departures will lead a person to be at home in the world; to swim currents instead of resisting them. At once comfortable in the science or the humanities, within the towering edifices of academia or roughing it in the mountains, Serres is looking for people who will pave their own way beyond the expected. Central to his philosophy is the notion that  the world is a patchwork of multiplicity - and if we are to live within it, we too must cultivated our multiple natures. As such both people and the world must be allowed to exist in a state in which multiplicity is nurtured, rather than sacrificed to categorization. Rather than domination, Serres is looking for the wisdom of flexibility and adequacy; for we as a people to learn to make room, to allow ourselves and the world to be multiple.