Central America Books

I'd never heard of Mari Sandoz until the other person who reviewed Slocum House sent me a copy, along with the suggestion that the tome should be on my SYLT Guide for good western fiction. After reading it twice I'm still puzzled about why Sandoz isn't more well known, even though the book was written in 1937.

Slocum House is one of the few works of fiction I've ever read that successfully portrays the nasty side of the power/wealth battle for the west. That battle and the results can be found easily enough in the nooks and crannies of actual history and autobiography. The Albert Fountain homicide in New Mexico, the various works gradually seeping out of the cracks about Mountain Meadows, Elfigo Baca, the Salt War and the Catron Gang and even the Pat Garrett homicide all portray a time in our history when county elections were a life and death matter. Until Mari Sandoz all that's mostly escaped the notice of fiction writers.

Slogum House should not be missed--it's certainly on a par with
Lonesome Dove. It's realistic and uncompromising--but don't look
for the sweep of Lonesome Dove, or the shootouts of most westerns.
The novel is about the Slogum family of Nebraska in the late 1800's
and up to the 1930's. Gulla Slogum rules the ranch--she's greedy
and unscrupulous--willing to prositute her daughters and encourage
her sons to rob and kill in order to expand her small empire. She
keeps a map, and slowly over the years is able to add new pieces
to the Slogum holdings. The sheriff and judge are kept on the
string with payoffs--both money and the sexual favors of two of
the daughters. There are no traditional shootouts--the sons
find things are much safer if they shoot someone in the back with
a rifle from a distance--why take chances?

The husband, Ruedy, is well-meaning, but weak. The two youngest
children, Libby and Ward, are decent people. There are others
over the years who come and go--such as Butch, Gulla's sadistic
brother. This is a portrayal of frontier life at it's best and
it's worst--at a time when the indian fighting is past, and when
we think that things are civilized. Reudy and Libby and Ward
persevere--they turn out to be the strongest ones in the end.

So--no cattle drives, no shootouts in front of a saloon. In fact,
almost all the scenes are at the ranch. It's a bleak, harsh, very
tough picture of rural Nebraska. The writing is excellent--there
are no parts that you find yourself hurrying through. I keep 3-4
copies--so that when I reread the book (about once a year) I can
find it easily.

A vivid chronicle of the heartbeat of America as glimpsed thorugh the daily life in small towns.

Clifton C. Edom founded the Missouri Photographic Workshop in 1949. Through his work with the workshop he became known as the father of photojournalism education. An instinctive alchemist and catalyst, he was less a teacher than a dominating presence. Cliff Edom presented his last workshop in 1990 shortly before his death. Nothing is forever, but the Missouri Workshop lives on in is image.

'Small Town America' seems an obvious choice for a photobook title but I doubt there has been anything published as good as this since Sherwood Anderson's 1940 'Home Town'. The 215 black and white photos reflect life in rural Missouri from the early fifties to the late eighties and it is all student work. In case this puts you off remember that these students had the benefit of some remarkable faculty members, Russell Lee for instance was part of the team for many years and his boss at the FSA, Roy Stryker taught in 1949 and 1957.

Visually the book is divided into four chapters, On Main Streets, Heart of the Country, A Place Called Home and chapter four has three photo essays covering a Joplin school in 1962, the Hannibal flood of 1986 and a family in Neosho during 1981. The three main chapters nicely run the photos out of date order though it seems to me that the earlier photos reflect the photojournalism techniques of the thirties and forties with their content-rich imagery. One of the really great ideas about Photo Workshop was that each year a different location was chosen so that the students were not photographing in the same place each year.

Look through the book several times, as I have over the years and you'll get a clear impression of small town America with a very human face. The book was published in 1993, perhaps it's time for an update to see how the students have seen rural Missouri since then and in color.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

This book grabs you right away, just in seeing what the subject is. It is certainly something which I have never really thought about before, discussing soft porn and how it has been portrayed. Mr. Andrews keeps it interesting and makes you want to keep turning the pages.

This is an excellent book on a strange subject -- soft core porn. I am hardly a porn afficianado but I found this book fascinating due to Andrew's careful treatment of softcore. Too often, Andrews argues, softcore porn is seen as a 'watered down' version of hard core pornography. Against this view he points out that softcore has its own distinct aesthetic. The similarity between soft core and more 'high brow' forms of art then becomes a source of anxiety to high-brow (and especially feminist) critics. As a result the book is about more than just pornography -- it is about how American culture categorizes things as 'sophisticated' or 'smut' and it demonstrates just how complex the line between these two things is and how it has been drawn (and defended) in the US today.

Now, to be honest, the book is an academic monograph -- it is not an easy-to-read pop piece. That said, Andrew's prose is easy to read by academic standards, with a wonderful economy of expression that conveys highly complex analysis in only slightly-complex prose. But what makes this book so great is not Andrew's analytical chops -- which, to be sure, he's got in spades -- but his stupendous erudition. His mastery of the genre -- the filmography lists hundreds of movies he has watched -- and his unparalleled knowledge of ths history of pornography is truly astonishing. Like an entomologist who knows every detail of 'his species' or a Shakespeare scholar who can provide paragraphs of commentary for each line in Hamlet, Andrews simply appears to have acheived that rare feat: total knowledge of an entire genre. And this gives him the ability to understand and present the genre's relevance for our understanding of all forms of art and media.

It is difficult to believe that something as... well.. _smutty_ as soft core pornography could have something to teach us about media and society in America, but that is exactly what David Andrews manages to convince us of in this tasty book on a tasteless topic.

Reviewing this book, which I have owned since it first appeared (thanks to the fantastic Urban Latino magazine for reviewing it so long ago), I feel a lot like Dracula opening the door to Jon Harker, saying *enter of your own free will*. This book is filled with darkness. Manmade darkness. Apapthetic darkness.

However, when you buy and open this book, it is filled with the light of love as well. A spirit that keeps these young people going amidst a hopeless cycle. The photographs illuminate in the greatest tradition of photojournalism. W. Eugene Smith would be proud. The photos never pander to our emotions, yet they don't allow us to stand above implacably indifferent either. You can feel the love from the photographer and his night guide: a priest who takes in some of the kids. An amazing intimate body of work.

But that's not all. You have a job to do after you open this book, as Bianca Jagger so eloquently pleads - what will we do *now that we are no longer ignorant*. It is a call of awareness and a call to action.

Human beings are leaving wide swaths of evidence for the prosecution to codemn us to our fate. This is a key piece of photographic evidence for you the jury to consider...

see the effects of the globalization of our work force, the effects of reducing a great nation from the revolutionary socialist hopes of the eighties to its entrapment through conservative and now arrested President Aleman into the multi-national industrial slave labor machine. See this book and its photos and feel for yourself what we do where we cannot see for the greater profit of Wall Street. In the Sandinista eighties these same people had housing, education, literacy and jobs. Now our USA victory leaves them nothing at all.

THe preface by Nicaraguan Mrs. Jagger (the inspiration for Brown Sugar) is worth the purchase alone.

He reads this book over and over again. Beautiful illustrations and lots of detailed information about the Brazilian rainforest.

This book is a wonderful introduction to the rain forest and poison dart frogs for children. The story takes you through the life of a strawberry poison dart frog (my daughter Jessie's favorite frog) from egg to adult. The story is excellent and the pictures are fantastic! I have been to La Selva twice so I can say that the story and pictures are realistic. A picture quiz at the end of the book will keep your eyes open for other rain forest wildlife living in the pictures of this wonderful book. I instruct environmental education programs and use this book often. Enjoy!

This is an excellent book for young children who are just beginning to learn about the world.

I have some students from South America every year. The United States doesn't seem to cover South America very well except for concetrating on wildlife in the Rainforests. This book does very nice to highlight that there is life of the human variety in addition to all that beautiful forest.

This marvelous and insightful immigration history represents cultural history at its finest, with brilliant thoughts on the broader issues of homeland, citizenship and national identity alongside detailed investigations of Polish, Irish, and Eastern European settlers. If only this book was published in paperback, so it would be more accessible in the classroom!

Jacobson's book is at once a painstaking review of original texts and a highly compelling read, no matter how long ago your family arrived. A must read for professional historians and anyone interested in American Studies and Cultural History

The book Spinning Wheels represents a series of books that have outlined the breakdown of the traditional adminstrative model of education. The book does an outstanding job investigating the inherent paradoxes of urban education. The traditional model has collapsed and a new model for the 21st Century is critical to the future K-12 education in America. It is amazing that the restructuring of the Adminstrative cadre has not taken place in 1999. The tragedy of the traditional model is that it does not reflect the massive changes of the quality management movement instituted by Juran. The mistaken notion that today's adminstrative cadre needs no essential training in modern management theory and practice is very similar to the Communist Chinese cadre who believe that a modern capitalistic economy can be created without a fundamental understanding of modern economic theory and practice. Spinning Wheels captures the triumph of political rhetoric over real managerial changes that need to be implemented in adminstration. The modern urban superintendent is trapped by a demographic paradox between the X generation and the Achievement generation that has created a "policy churn" in the killing fields of modern urban education.

This book is about a very basic problem in urban schools, the problem of reform churn. In surveying over 60 urban schools, the author found that there is a pattern of school boards hiring new school superintendents, who comes in with great promise and lots of new ideas. There are lots of changes for a couple years, but there is no dramatic improvement, so the current school superintendent gets fired because things are still bad. Then a new superintendent comes in, again promising to fix things by implementing a lot of changes. The net result is no reform last long enough to truly fix any problems. The school district keeps lurching in different directions every couple years, never making any real progress.

As I read this book I thought of:

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"We trained hard, but it seemed every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization"

From Petronii Arbitri Satyricon AD 66.
Attributed to Gaius Petronus

Gaius Petronus, a Roman General, later committed suicide
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A pattern on constant reform is not new. Frederick Hess analyses the environment that produces this pattern in the school environment. He finds that in general members of the school board want to be re-elected. Many are using the office of school board as a stepping stone to other elected political offices. In general school boards which fight with each other don't get re-elected, so they are motivated to find issues they can agree on, and reform is an issue for which most board members see a need. So when there is a problem in the school district, they don't hire a new school superintendent who comes in promising to continue the reforms of the previous superintendent, they hire someone with fresh new ideas. The result is the old reforms which may have just started producing fruit are ignored and teachers are told to try some new methods. The result is things are not improving in the urban schools.

The author makes the point that schools deal with two very important subjects, children and money. People are concerned that both are taken care of well. Unfortunately there are no simple objective measures to see how well a school is doing. This is partly the result of there being no clear, agreed upon, purpose to education. Some want children taught academic subjects, some want children to learn to be good citizens, some want children to be taught to take care of the earth, and so on. All of this means that people care very much about schools, but people can't tell how well a school is doing. So appearances become very important. Both the school board and the superintendent are strongly influenced to put on a good front.

This idea of appearances being very important is explored in great depth in the book. And other related ideas are mentioned on why there is such a dizzying rate of reform efforts in urban schools.

The book is well written. It is well structured. The author has done his research. It is interesting to read, though often painful to learn how bad things are. If you are looking for a better understanding of one of the key problems with public schools, this book is very worth reading.