East West Street and Ratline

Sands, Philippe

Last Updated: Jun-28-2021

Trachtman, Howard

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Summary:

The literature on the Holocaust is vast and has been examined from every angle. One might think that nothing more could be written on the topic or that there could be no new perspectives on this horrific event that occurred less than 100 years ago. But Philippe Sands would prove you wrong. In these two linked books, he tells an extraordinary real life story that combines personal experience and world history into a narrative that is as powerful as any novel.

East West Street is the first in this unplanned sequence of books. It recounts how Sands received an invitation to an academic conference and traveled to Lemberg, Poland (modern-day Lviv, Ukraine), where his family came from. His seemingly clear-cut goal was to understand what happened to his relatives and why his grandfather Leo Buchholz was the only survivor. As he digs deeper into his family’s tragic story, he learns that two men, Hersch Lauterpacht and Rafael Lemkin, attended the same university in Lemberg as his grandfather and at about the same time after World War I. The three men did not know each other and Lauterpacht and Lemkin are not household names. However, Sands underscores their importance in coming to grips with the Holocaust and skillfully weaves the two men’s stories together.

As his grandfather struggled to escape the ravages of the German occupation of Europe, Lauterpacht and Lemkin were already thinking about how to punish the Nazis for their wartime crimes. According to international law before these two men arrived on the legal scene, state sovereignty was uncontested and leaders could do whatever they wanted to their citizens without fear of external intervention. Lauterpacht coined the term “crimes against humanity” to provide an international framework to prosecute the Nazi leaders, and Lemkin devised the term “genocide” to create a new crime that transcended national boundaries. Sands describes how these two vastly different men struggled to get their terms incorporated into the formal charges against the Nazis by the team of lawyers that represented the victorious nations at the Nuremberg tribunal. In the course of his investigation, Sands meets Niklas Frank, the son of Hans Frank, who supervised the extermination of the Jewish population in Lemberg and the surrounding area and who was one of the 23 defendants in the Nuremberg trial. Niklas is contrite and rejects his father because of his monstrous crimes. However, he introduces Sands to Horst Wachter, the son of Otto Wachter, Hans Frank’s chief deputy, who was primarily responsible for implementing the Final Solution on the ground.

This is where Ratline picks up the tale. In this sequel, Sands describes in more detail what happened to his own family, while Otto Wachter climbed higher in the Nazi hierarchy. Sands describes Wachter’s growing family and his infidelities. He documents how his wife ignored Otto’s behavior and military activity while benefiting from all the perks that came her way because of her husband’s efficiently murderous success. Wachter was forced to run for his life when the war ended and spent almost a year hiding out in the mountains of central Europe to escape capture. When it appeared safe, he traveled to Rome to take advantage of the “ratline” of the title to escape and find refuge in South America. Through the conniving of Vatican officials, American counterintelligence officers, and others he almost succeeded. But he died in mysterious circumstances before he could leave Rome. There is an extraordinary and logic-defying linkage between the families that comes to light because of Sands’ meticulous detective work, and it rivals anything a screenwriter could dream up.

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Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution

Newnham , Nicole; LeBrecht, James

Last Updated: Jun-21-2021

Schilling, Carol

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution is an exuberant film by and about people who have been marginalized on screen and in their lives. It opens with black and white archival footage of Camp Jened, a quirky, free-spirited, counter-culture summer camp for disabled teenagers in New York’s Catskilll Mountains. One camper called it a utopia. The second and longer part of the film follows several former campers into their adult lives. They become parents, spouses, professionals, and disability rights activists at a crucial historic moment for disability legislation. Both parts of the film propose that the liberty and solidarity experienced at Jened emboldened several of the campers to seek opportunity and equality, for themselves and others, in the world beyond their camp.

Located near Woodstock, geographically and culturally, Jened offered a space free from the discrimination the summer residents encountered elsewhere. Campers could engage in uninhibited physical activities, uncensored storytelling, self-governance, mutual caretaking, real friendships, irreverent insider humor, romance, and fun. One powerful scene allows viewers to overhear campers with diverse disabilities share common experiences: being disrespected or ignored at school, overly protected at home, isolated everywhere. Another tracks the campers’ hilarity and pride over an outbreak of “crabs.” One camper declares his counselor’s demonstration of how to kiss, “Best physical therapy ever!”

While the film’s co-director, former camper Jim Lebrecht, narrates the film, Judy Huemann is its political and moral center. A wheelchair user, she rose from camper to counselor. Huemann was revered around camp for successfully suing the New York City Department of Education for the right to teach. She and several post-campers reunited in Berkeley, California, where they became involved in the Independent Living Movement. An astute leader, Heumann is represented as central to a remarkable 25-day sit-in at the San Francisco Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) offices in 1977. She and her disabled colleagues risked their health and their lives—they slept on the floor and improvised medical necessities—to convince HEW to approve regulations essential for enforcing the anti-discrimination section of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act. The scene of Heumann’s standoff with the HEW representative is unforgettable. As are the deliveries of food, supplies, and solidarity that the Black Panthers and other marginalized groups in San Francisco provided daily. Other archival footage, including of Heumann and demonstrators stopping traffic in New York City to demand accessible taxis and of protestors abandoning their wheelchairs to pull themselves up the steps of the nation’s Capitol, are startling images of the struggle to secure disability civil rights in the United States. Recently filmed interviews with several of the former campers affirm that, despite the work toward disability justice that remains, they live fuller, more vibrant lives as a result of their experiences at Jened and the legislation they insisted on.

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Joji

Pothan, Dileesh

Last Updated: Jun-13-2021

Teagarden, J. Russell

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

“Grandpa is in quarantine,” Popy tells the delivery man through his face mask in the opening scene. His grandfather was not in quarantine; Popy had ordered an air gun using his account and now needed to conceal it from him. But, because the movie is set during the Covid-19 pandemic, the delivery man could easily believe Popy’s story and hands over the package with the gun.

Popy is a teenager living in a multigenerational household in India, which in addition to his grandfather, Kuttappan PK Panachel, includes his father, Jomon, two uncles, Jaison and Joji, and Jaison’s wife, Bincy. They live on a sprawling and prosperous plantation Kuttappan owns near Kerala. Imperious and parsimonious, Kuttappan keeps tight control over his domain and family. As the movie begins, we see cracks forming in the family from the continuous pressure he exerts. The pressure affects Joji most.

Though he dropped out of an engineering college, Joji seeks wealth and independence, but his attempts to attain riches yield little until Kuttappan suffers a stroke. From the time of his father’s struggle for survival until his death, Joji plots to hasten his father’s demise and secure the family fortune for himself. Lives are lost, and so are Joji’s aspirations.

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Transcendent Kingdom

Gyasi, Yaa

Last Updated: Jun-07-2021

Trachtman, Howard

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

Can scientists be religious? Is Religion or Science best able to deal with the psychological problems that can arise over a lifetime? Yaa Gyasi’s powerful new book, Transcendent Kingdom, aims to answer these perennial questions. Gifty, the precocious daughter of two Ghanaian immigrants, is the narrator and the main character in this novel. She grows up in Huntsville, Alabama where her parents settled after moving to the United States. Her mother works as home health aide and her father is a manual laborer. Gifty’s older brother, Nana, is a talented athlete who excels in basketball and becomes the leading scorer and star of his high school team. Religion is a key element in the mother’s worldview, and she impresses this on Gifty. The mother and daughter attend an evangelical church, and both are convinced that they can feel the presence of God, that he speaks to them, and helps guide their life. The father, called the Chin Chin Man, becomes homesick for Ghana and leaves the family to return his birthplace.

With the nuclear family reduced to three and her mother overworking to earn enough to care for her children, young Gifty assumes major responsibility for her older brother, Nana. He suffers an ankle injury during a basketball game. Unfortunately, playing out a common script, he is given a prescription for oxycodone to control the pain. The prescription is renewed and Nana, like so many others in similar situations, becomes addicted and ultimately succumbs to a heroin overdose. The family is now a twosome. In parallel with the family saga, Gifty is a graduate student in neuroscience at Stanford after a successful college career at Harvard. Her mother moves in with her because of extreme depression. Gifty is working on mice using state-of-the-art methods to map the neural pathways that control reward-seeking behavior. Her research effort is motivated by an attempt to understand her mother, who has almost no reward- seeking behavior due to her depression, and her brother who could not suppress his reward-seeking activity. The story is filled with emotionally wrenching episodes that fill in the details of the main characters. The ending is surprising but provides a satisfying resolution to Gifty‘s approach to life and her challenges with her family members’ experience with overwhelming psychiatric disease.

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THE GREAT INFLUENZA: A Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History

Barry, John

Last Updated: May-25-2021

Field, Steven

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: History

Summary:

John Barry’s The Great Influenza is a deep dive into the history of the influenza pandemic of 1918. But it is not simply a deep dive into the purely medical aspects of that history—as no medical histories truly are—but is in addition an exploration of the social and political currents of the time that coexisted with and facilitated the pandemic.

Although his story opens with the establishment of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1876, Barry immediately takes a detour into the history of medicine dating back to Hippocrates, and traces the history of medical/scientific thought from Ancient Greece to the end of the 19th century. He then introduces a series of physicians, scientists, and medical researchers who will play their parts in the story of the pandemic (this first section is called “The Warriors”) and outlines their training, research, and interactions.

It isn’t until page 91 that he takes us to the rural Kansas county in which the story of the pandemic begins. For although it was called the “Spanish Flu,” that was actually an eponym of convenience; in fact, the first cases of pandemic flu seem to have arisen on the American prairie. However, newspaper reporting on the new pandemic was felt by the Allies and Central Powers alike to be contrary to the public interest (the war was still raging), so it was left to neutral Spain, whose king had come down with the disease, to publish the early reports. In this section, “The Swarm”, Barry also briefly reviews the basic (not to worry, very basic) microbiology of viruses and the history of some prior pandemics. He follows this with the section called “The Tinderbox,” in which he traces the events leading up to the entry of the United States into World War I, and the importance of that war and the political and social conditions surrounding it in the history of the pandemic. From here on in the influenza itself takes center stage; in sections called “It Begins,” “Explosion,” “Pestilence,” “The Race,” and “The Tolling of the Bell,” the rapid and lethal course of the pandemic is described in gripping (no pun intended) detail. The last two sections discuss the scientific advances (and some false starts) brought about by the cadre of researchers working day and night to tame the outbreak, and then Barry finally turns to the retreat of the virus and ultimate end of the pandemic. The book ends as it began, returning to the stories of the individual men and women of science who engaged in the battle to beat the disease of which it had initially been said by many that “[t]his was, after all, only influenza.”

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The Arrow Tree: Healing from Long COVID

Weliver, Phyllis

Last Updated: May-18-2021

Clark, Mark

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

The title of this memoir derives from the Native American custom of bending a tree’s growth in order to indicate a direction of safe passage. The custom represents a reverent cooperation with nature through which a compassionate communication is accomplished: a message to other journeying souls as to how they might find a way to their flourishing. The title is exquisitely apt for this memoir, which echoes the gesture of the arrow tree, testifying to a safe passage through the wilderness of COVID. The author, a first-rate, published Victorian scholar, contracted COVID-19 in March 2020 upon her return from a sabbatical at the University of Cambridge, which was cut short as a result of the pandemic.

Weliver has suffered from symptoms ever since: hers is the experience of living with long COVID. The condition warrants her taking a leave from her university, and she returns to her childhood home of Interlochen, in northern Michigan. Her living in and engaging with the natural world there encourages her to undertake meditations about that world and her place in it as she lives with her illness. The writing—the foundational means of her healing—inclines her, crucially, to think with the stories of the Odawa (Ottawa) and the Ojibwe (Chippewa), Anishinaabek ("Original Man") of the region, which she researches as a means of deepening her understanding of her home, her origins, and the nature of her identity. Her quest for understanding turns not only to these stories, but to an integration of them with the wisdom of other guides in her life: authors of the Romantic and Victorian periods, poets and thinkers of Taoism and other ancient Eastern philosophies, mentors in her rich journey of studying both literature and music (she attended Interlochen Center for the Arts, Oberlin, where she double-degreed in English Literature and Voice (Music), Cambridge, and the University of Sussex), and her own family, particularly her mother. Her prose is accessible and welcoming, not at all the erudite sort one might anticipate from a reputable scholar: it invites curiosity and encourages insight that is, at times, breathtaking and joyous. This “arrow tree” memoir points its readers in the direction of a safe passage to the home of our natural world, where, in finding union with that world, we may experience healing not only from COVID but from habits of the heart that have left us more broken than we know.

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The Father

Zeller, Florian

Last Updated: Apr-26-2021

Teagarden, J. Russell

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

The basic plot of The Father mirrors the all-too-common trajectory people with dementia follow: first they deny any problems; then they progressively need more in-home assistance; and then they require institutionalization. This scenario, however, gets obscured when watching the film’s main character—the father—wrestle with quotidian activities and familiar faces. The viewers wrestle with him, and become just as confused and rattled. Florian Zeller, the screenwriter and director, admits he wants viewers feeling what people with dementia feel. He succeeds in the movie as he succeeded in the Broadway play version preceding it.

The father, Anthony, lived in his London flat with help from hired caregivers and his daughter, Anne, who lived nearby. After Anthony banished several caregivers on grounds they were unnecessary, Anne moves him into her flat, and when he’s too much for her there, she moves him to a nursing home. We’re never quite sure, though. Zeller makes the two flats and the nursing home look almost identical. He changes Anne’s story at different times: she’s still married after ten years; she’s been divorced for five years; she’s relocating to Paris with a lover; she was never relocating to Paris; she relocated to Paris. Anne appears as a different person on occasion and the husband she may or may never had appears as different people. Zeller overlays these confusing surroundings and events by jumping forward and backward in time, and repeating some scenes with slight variations. Eventually, Anthony says, “strange things are going on around us.” Viewers will feel the same, and that’s the point.

The movie ends as Anthony awakes in his nursing home room. Just as we are lured into thinking we have returned to the common dementia trajectory at its end, we see his nurse is the person who had appeared as Anne before, and his room looks like the bedrooms in both his own and Anne’s flats. We wonder.

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Hair

Corso, Gregory

Last Updated: Apr-25-2021

Mahl, Evan

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Parenthesis

Durand, Élodie

Last Updated: Apr-23-2021

Miksanek, Tony

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Graphic Memoir

Summary:

Judith, a French woman in her early twenties, experiences "spells" - episodes of shaking, staring, and sudden memory loss. These spells occur daily and her behavior becomes erratic. She visits a neurologist. He diagnoses epileptic seizures and prescribes medication. Yet the convulsions continue so Judith's drug dose is upped and an MRI of the brain is done.

The MRI scan finds a small tumor that appears inoperable. A brain biopsy reveals an astrocytoma. Judith's life now revolves around her illness and the medical monitoring of it. Time feels distorted, and she likens her seizures to "a little death." Everyday life becomes blurred. She is advised to see a neuropsychiatrist. Her parents worry about her constantly.

Eventually Judith is referred for Gamma Knife radiosurgery. Eighteen months after the procedure is completed, only a tiny scar at the site of the tumor remains. Three years following the treatment, the seizures are gone. She rediscovers the joy of life and embraces a hopeful future.

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Main Street: How a City's Heart Connects Us All

Thompson Fullilove, Mindy

Last Updated: Apr-19-2021

Carter, III, Albert Howard

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Ethnography

Summary:

Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD, is a Black social psychiatrist with wide-ranging interests; her book analyzes factors that support or diminish the health of cities as places that sustain its citizens. Over many years, she has visited and studied 178 cities in 14 countries, and she draws on the work of experts from several disciplines to address the fundamental question: how may we best live together?

Her discussion moves through five concepts for understanding the health of a city by describing a dozen cities ranging from Paris to Jersey City. Each features a “Scroll,” a two-page presentation of photos, graphics, and text. Her discussions give an inductive basis for her concepts that become criteria for assessing the health of any city.

(1) Box (“in all sizes and shapes”): the surrounding shape of buildings, street, and sky; it gives an identity to the city’s center with its useful assets such as stores, post office, bank, food, and entertainment.

(2) Circle: the larger area surrounding a Box—maybe a half a mile in radius. Its health requires ease of travel to and from the box.

(3) Line: usually the Main Street that runs through the box, therefore a central path to town. Good transportation is important, and the main street can be quite long, for example Palisades Avenue in Englewood, New Jersey.

(4) Tangle: a dense network of streets and highways that connect to main streets and the Box.
(5) Time: no city is static; as years go by, there are changes for good or ill.

Fullilove mentions politics, capitalism, poverty, disincentives, tribalism, racism, highways, malls, interstates, and “urban renewal” that destroyed neighborhoods of minorities, as well as redlining against Blacks and gerrymandering school districts to segregate Black and white students.

In “Naming and Framing the Problem,” she turns to a larger overview of challenges for cities in many places, but especially in the US: (1) “deep structure of inequality” (p. 211), such as the legacies of slavery, lynching, the 3/5 Compromise, and the Trail of Tears, as well as white supremacy today (2) ecological damage, including industrial farming, deforestation, and global warming, and (3) the inertia of the status quo.

Citing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Father Richard Rohr, Fullilove affirms love as the root for social justice, political activism (p. 211) so that cities might become what Thomas Edison termed “factories of invention” that will support the mental health and well-being of all of its citizens.

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