Review by New York Times Review
GHETTO: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea, by Mitchell Duneier. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) In contemporary usage, the term "ghetto," freighted with innuendo and negative connotations, has become divorced from its historical context. The idea of a ghetto began in 1500s Venice, when the city relegated its Jews to an island; Rome and other cities in Western Europe followed suit. Duneier traces the way in which comparable forces pushed blacks to the margins in America. THE NIX, by Nathan Hill. (Vintage, $17.) Fringe politics and globecrossing capers figure into this dizzying debut novel. A young English professor with a deadend book project writes instead about his mother, a former leftist radical who abandoned him as a child. Our reviewer, Teddy Wayne, praised Hill's story as "a supersize and audacious novel of American misadventure." ALLIGATOR CANDY: A Memoir, by David Kushner. (Simon & Schuster, $16.) In 1973, when the author was 4, his older brother Jonathan was abducted and murdered; the crime rattled his Florida hometown, and a profound silence settled in his home. Years later, Kushner approached his brother's death as a reporter, digging into news clips and other records to find out more; along with his emotional account of the event itself, he offers a glimpse of the crisis wrought by grief. THE ASSISTANTS, by Camille Perri. (Putnam, $16.) Tina, the assistant to a high-powered media executive in New York, is straining under meager pay and unpaid bills. When the opportunity arises to embezzle the amount needed to pay offher student loan balance - a sum that would pale next to her boss's own spending - she takes it. But when another assistant discovers the fraud, she blackmails Tina into committing the same crime to help her pay offher own debt. DIANE ARBUS: Portrait of a Photographer, by Arthur Lubow. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $17.99.) Drawing on interviews with Arbus's friends and lovers, correspondence and diary entries, Lubow's account of the troubled artist reads like a novel. He chronicles her relatively short career, including the lurid gossip - incest, sexual escapades, mental illness - that swirled around her, while giving her own voice a prominent role in the biography. SHELTER, by Jung Yun. (Picador, $16.) Kyung, a Korean-American, grew up financially comfortable - surrounded by tutors, music lessons and other markers of success - but in loveless, unaffectionate surroundings. Years later, he is struggling to keep his middle-class home when an act of violence leaves his parents, from whom he is largely estranged, unable to remain on their own.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
The word ghetto is used today mostly as a slur. In this dense yet accessible book, noted sociologist Duneier (Sidewalk, 1999) uncovers the intellectual and sociological history of how the word evolved from describing a place where Jews were segregated (in sixteenth-century Venice and in Rome under the Nazis, for example) to identifying poor, inner-city black neighborhoods. Chapters alternate between Chicago's South Side and New York's Harlem, providing case studies of both areas. The narrative moves seamlessly from the 1940s through 2004, with plenty of history and future thinking peppered in-between. Duneier examines social policy and activism in profiles of pioneering black scholar Horace Cayton and psychologist Kenneth Clark, during the era of race riots and white flight in the 1940s through the 1960s; William Julius Wilson in the time of welfare-reform policies of the 1980s and 1990s; and education reformer Geoffrey Canada in the early 2000s. This is a scholarly treatment, and the writing can be dense, but the book is timely and important.--Vnuk, Rebecca Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In his timely history of the black American ghetto and the thinkers who theorized and defined it, Princeton sociologist Duneier (Sidewalk) resuscitates the "forgotten ghetto" and the various ways it was understood. Tracing decades of scholarship that is inextricable from its political context, Duneier focuses on the prescient African-American scholars who were too often overshadowed by more prominent white academics. Post-WWII, Horace Cayton drew on the history of Jewish ghettos from 16th-century Venice to Nazi Germany, forging a metaphorical link between the Jewish and black ghettos and assisting his crusade against the racial covenants he saw as instrumental in the creation of the black ghetto. Kenneth Clark's civil rights-era criticisms of "social work colonialism" and understanding of ghetto dwellers as "subject people" echoed Black Power rhetoric. William Julius Wilson's analysis, emphasizing an economic framework over a racial one, gained traction during the Reagan era, and the tactics of Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone reflect a modern, corporate mind-set. Duneier's main lesson is perhaps the most damning: the intractability of the black ghetto results from a moral failure of white Americans, who remain unwilling to make sacrifices for the benefit of racial minorities. It is not an easy conclusion to hear, but Duneier's far-reaching and incisive study makes it a hard one to deny. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Duneier (sociology, Princeton Univ.; Slim's Table) offers a fascinating analysis of the various conceptions of the "ghetto" throughout history, as well as a look into the many sociological controversies of these areas and structural racism in the United States. The author takes readers on a visit to Poland and Germany with civil rights leader and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, as Du Bois witnesses the ghettoization of the Jews in Europe. The book then traces these designated living quarters through Jewish communities in Venice and Rome to the Nazis' deadly Warsaw ghetto. Next, Duneier explores the ghetto's relationship to U.S. racial policies and politics using the writings of three well-known black sociologists: Horace Clayton, Kenneth Clark, and William Julius Wilson. By providing their work, Duneier gives a clearer understanding of the serious issues relating to housing, school, and employment discrimination along with the various attempts by black scholars to play a societal role in remedying these uniquely American racial problems. VERDICT A clearly written book for anyone who is interested in the history of racism and its possible solutions.-Amy Lewontin, Northeastern Univ. Lib., Boston © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
