Minnesota Books

Lynn Fujiwara (assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Oregon) presents Mothers Without Citizenship: Asian Immigrant Families and the Consequences of Welfare Reform, a scholarly, extensively researched, and highly critical account of the American government's increasingly hostile attitude toward immigrants in general and Asian immigrants particular, especially female Asian immigrants and their children. Taking to task policy changes in the 1990's to the present day, which enacted draconian cuts in public assistance to poor immigrant families among other stigmatizations, Mothers Without Citizenship questions the nationalist assumptions that poverty is the fault of the poor, or the racist assumption that Asian immigrants are a "model minority" that does not need the health care, food stamps, or other public services provided as a safety net against the ravages of utter destitution. The overall climate for immigrants in general has only become worse in the wake of the September 11th attacks. "Within Asian Pacific Islander communities, the drastic increase of deportations among Cambodians and Filipinos has alarmed communities as families are separated, and as people are deported back to a country they do not know and/or where they will face persecution. Thus, even though new voting blocs have emerged and reshaped local politics with high immigrant constituencies, the pervasive "terrorist" threat has subjugated political consciousness of immigrant rights." A strongly worded and much-needed counterbalance to consider in the wake of rising anti-immigrant sentiment.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

I really like this book. Edith Mayo still is a great inspiration; she was dedicated to her family and the care of the patients at Mayo Clinic.
The book is well written and I pick it up often for a bit of inspiration.
Edith could be "just in the next room", still praying and reaching out for those who need help.

And there's another Music Legends book coming out later that will have information on more music artists from Minnesota like Prince. The book has great pictures and information on the music scene in Minnesota. It would be a perfect gift for a fellow Minnesotan Music Lover too.

Bill Holm's ways with words are charming and engaging. I laughed aloud. I wept openly. I read bits aloud to the woman next to me on the plane. More than tolerating this, she, too, was moved by his writing and had some of her own answering tales. His places come alive. Who would not want to visit his cousin's garden of rusting tools and cars and decaying couches from which emerge iris and tulips, would not want to pass the narrator's test by having just the right response to a sacred place, lovingly tended? Well, there are those who would not - but they would not stay with the book long enough to find out about this garden. They would find nothing intriguing about the title.

The warmth and depth of Holm's confessional style invites answering tales. He makes a case for people who look with a prairie eye; contrasts them with those who look with a woods eye. While I may not agree with all of his characterizations, the idea of the contrast made me wonder which I have - if not both. Do simple, plain lines show us grace and understated beauty? Does the dark forest color our perceptions of the world? Yes, the narrator looks with a prairie eye, he proudly, boldly proclaims. He advocates for nurturing the prairie eye, the ability to see what had felt monotonous with the subtle variations that suggest beauty.

I cannot comment upon the title essay. The woman on the plane liked the book so much - and was not from Minnesota so might have a harder time finding it (I don't know if she was on-line.) - that I gave it to her before I had finished.

All that is necessary to address the ills of our world is for men and women of good intention to become involved. "My Heart It Is Delicious: Setting the Course for Cross-Cultural Health Care" is the story and history of the Center for International Health and a small group of Minnesota citizens who felt the need to form the American Refugee Committee of Minneapolis respond to an international health crisis in the form of starving and sick refugees on the war-torn Thai-Cambodian border in 1979 by sending a small medical team to their assistance. During the ensuing three decades a great many lessons were learned, including the necessity to adapt western medicine to southeast Asian cultures so that when non-English-speaking refugees came to American they could hope for improved health care. A compilation of illustrative stories, "My Heart It Is Delicious" is profusely illustrated throughout with both black-and-white as well as color photography, enhancing the text and the reader's appreciation for what has been accomplished against seemingly insurmountable odds. A heartwarming account of the good that can be done, the changes that can be made, the successes represented by shattered lives made whole again, and the never ending need for men and women of good conscience like Dr. Patricia Walker (directory of the Center for International health in St. Paul), "My Heart It Is Delicious" is very encouraging and occasionally inspiring reading.

Carol Bly's stories call me home. She captures nuances of Midwest culture, and in particular, aches in the souls of Midwest women, with a startling precision, honesty, and eloquence that reminds me of everyone I ever grew up with.

But a Bly story goes beyond simply the personal level of her characters' lives. "Chuck's Money," for example, the final story in her new collection, is a penetrating analysis of issues of class structure, power politics, and moral crises in Small Town America as they play themselves out in quiet marriages, church carpools, and funeral suppers. Through the eyes of bookkeeper Leona and her oak tree of a husband Allen, we see how the suicide of a teenager sets in motion a series of events that redress old and new injustices. The net result is an exuberant image of people who can be so decent sometimes it takes your breath away.

David Campbell's book is a very well-researched application of the thought of Jacques Derrida and Emanuel Levinas to the decisionmaking in the former Yugoslavia...a topic once again sadly in the news owing to troubles in Kosovo.

Campbell argues that the very visible failures of the West in the war in Bosnia and the 1995 Dayton peace settlement was due to a very deep conceptual failure of policymakers...a failure that came with their education, and that they might regard as wisdom.

This is to oversimplify national affairs down to a misunderstood "identity politics."

Real identity politics would respect what Campbell describes as a basic moral demand the "other" makes upon us, with his different needs and views. Campbell's ethical view is that the "other" makes a moral demand upon us even if his suffering has "nothing to do" with us.

Campbell bases his deepest views on the thought of Levinas, an interwar thinker who radically departed from Western philosophical traditions in that Levinas regards ethics, not metaphysics, as fundamental to philosophy. There's a glimmer of this in Kant and in literary thinkers like Clives Staples Lewis, but Levinas is one of the few Western philosophers to show how mere coherence of thought depends on respect for the "other."

The deconstructive turn in philosophy is to center difference, and borders between people as the focus. This was not an attempt to be cute, or post-modern, on the part of the French beginning in the 1950s; instead, it was a serious response to the fact that placing concepts like man at the center hadnt liberated people in the period 1900-1950. Instead it had led to the Holocaust and the Gulag, for when ordinary people are told to implement some concept like man they immediately triage people into the prime and the secondary and the marginal examples of man. They simplify and the result is that people get hurtfrom downsized in corporations to killed in camps.

Western policymakers, educated outside this tradition, instinctively abhor this as "soft" thinking. Instead, the Kissinger school of *realpolitik* was brought to bear in Bosnia. In part, this simplifies complex and multidimensioned ethnic issues into Serb/Croat/Moslem, when even a hard-nosed mathematician can see that if intermarriage is permitted there are many more combinations possible.

This has had the result of further violence, both resulting from Dayton and now in Kosovo. However, for Americans to criticise this violence seems to get them in a confusing zone where "all parties are guilty", including the Bosnians and the Albanians.

Campbell helps to sort out the "bad" guys and the not-so-good but better guys by showing how the West, the Serbs and to an extent the Croats were able to victimize a state which, for all its real flaws, expressed respect for the ethnic Other in its constitution, and made an effort to live up to this committment.

The book IS hard going at times, but this reminds me of a statement Chicago's "Fast Eddie" Vrydolyak, made when a reporter made a suggestion about race relations: Vrdolyak said "yer talkin' Martian." Simplicity, in a complex world, can be as ideological as undue complexity.

The author would have us consider a wide diversity of materials as evidence of our cohabitation with the evil we prefer to think of as being in some other or former place. His aim is for us to see rather than to continue to "not see" certain continuities and juxtapositions that are out there. The good news is that if the author has indeed succeeded in (re-)locating the horror of National Socialism within the psychoanalytic discourse, then there is the outside chance at least that it can be contained (for example as ambivalent introject). The author does insist that the materials undergo the mediation of the unconscious, in particular his own. Hence his style, which walks the borderline, slipping and sliding in and out of pop-cultural puns or noise, will upset those who believe that neutrality and objectivity are still options for "historians" of twentieth-century traumatization. The author, who clearly and endearlingly (or naively) believes that there is intelligent life out there, is looking for nonphobic readers.

This book is an excellent primer for understanding the unique working conditions of film actors. Clark effectively identifies the actor's true status as worker first, celebrity/artist, etc. second. The lessons from this book can be applied to organizing other types of contingent workers such as I.T. workers and construction workers. A definite read for labor students and organizers.

Armand Mattelart is a French professor of information and communication theory at the Université de Paris-VIII, Saint-Denis. His book is concisely written at only 123 pages and provides an insightful argument against globalization. Mattelart explains how freedom of speech translates on a global scale to freedom of commerce.

The central problem for Mattelart is that by letting corporations network the world, we are letting them control the marketplace of ideas, as if they have shackled the invisible hand of capitalistic self-governance. This inevitably leads, says Mattelart, to what is essentially nothing more than human commodification, such that the marketplace of ideas is essentially a parroting frenzy of talking heads socioeconomically engineered to spread profitable memes.