A couple days ago I was surprised by a John Phillip Sousa march. It was a drippy Sunday morning around 7:00 a.m. I was driving to the local Kroger to buy a half gallon of milk. When I switched on the radio in the car, there it was, this irresistibly jaunty piece of music. I…More
Monthly Archives: December 2021
Savage City: A Review
Anyone looking at the current state of affairs in the US–the violence, racism, poverty, and corruption–will ask, How did we get here? The answer presented in Donald Levin’s Savage City is that we’ve always been here. Levin takes the reader to Detroit in the Spring of 1932. The Great Depression is in full swing, as…More
Divine Aphasia: A review
In 1973 Clifford Geertz introduced the term “thick description” to ethnographic studies, recognizing that “culture is a knotty and often mysterious thing, made up of layers upon layers of intertwined symbols and signs.” The researcher produces detail-rich accounts of his or her research, identifies patterns and relationships and contexts for meaning. It is this penetrating…More
Don’t Worry About the Key–whistling, singing, disappearing
I’m not supposed to hear this. I’m not even supposed to be awake at this hour. It’s 3:00 a.m. Lying beside me, gently asleep, my wife is making a whistling sound. She inhales, then exhales, and there it is: a soft, clear whistle, with each exhaled breath. So it’s true. When I was a kid,…More
Good Egg
You had to wonder if Fred got anything out of The Great Gatsby. This was 10th grade English at Freeland High School. This was Fred Conway, a kid everyone made fun of, a kid who was brutally picked on and mocked by guys (of course it was guys) for talking slow, for not being very…More