David K. Shipler's The Working Poor is the most thorough and studious book about American poverty I've read (and I've read several, including a couple of Jonathan Kozol's books, plus Nickel and Dimed, and Random Family, among others. It's comprehensive, and divides chapters into specific issues. Shipler is pretty impartial, and the book doesn't really veer into politics much, which is refreshing in its way. He's pretty hard at times on teachers, and never adequately addresses the fact that many teachers aren't far from being "the working poor," themselves (I'm not being snotty here--teacher salaries in some places in the country can be criminally low). However, I'm the first to admit that there are a lot of crappy teachers out there, so maybe he has a point.
If you're interested in poverty issues, or like sociology reads (I clearly do), this is a really clear and interesting book that has the added bonus of being serious and well-researched. Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed is more personal and at times preachy, and Shipler's voice is removed enough to keep The Working Poor from suffering from preachiness.
These are good days to be a St. Louis Cardinals fan. While home in St. Louis, I went with my parents to a Cards/Astros game on Friday, which the Cards won on a walk-off homer by Albert Pujols in the bottom of the thirteenth inning. It was remarkably excited, especially since it was the first major league baseball game my mother had ever been to. I snapped the below picture during the celebration:
Richard Ford's Independence Day is not the sort of book I usually read. Books that feature first person narratives by middle aged men don't usually grab me.
That said, this book (which I began reading on July 4, in a poetic moment) managed to capture the mundane in a really dynamic way, and I do love the realistic. Plus, it's a novel of the Northeast, and I enjoyed reading about such a familiar setting. There are things I would change (there are a few slow sections, for example) and I'm not going to claim to have liked the narrator all the time. He's a flawed dude, and sometimes as a reader, I wanted to shake him or perhaps even kick him in the shins. However, I can't imagine a middle aged, male, realtor in New Jersey that I could ever meet that I wouldn't want to kick in the shins at some point. Ford also has a way with words that can be quite striking, and at the oddest points.
Finally, this is a book about Frank (the narrator). It's not about anyone else, and it's important not to read it hoping for more than that, because that's not what the book aims to do. I can't say that all of the supporting characters are well-developed, but that is not really the point, and once I adjusted to that, the book became more enjoyable.
Everyone should see Murderball. A documentary about quadriplegic rugby somehow managed to be a comedy, drama, and classic sports movie all-in-one, with no cloying sentimentality. I really hope this movie takes off so that people can maybe take one quick moment to think about perceptions of people with disabilities. Hmm. That sounded sort of condescending, but I think the movie provides a really good context for thinking about that sort of thing.
The filmmakers did a really good job of framing the movie as well. There are several threads, not all directly related to the main "plot," and there's a moment at the end that ties up one of the threads that left my moviegoing companion and I completely gob-smacked. Go see the movie.
I predictably loved Three Nights in August. It's written by a respected author (Buzz Bissinger, of Friday Night Lights) about my favorite baseball team, the St. Louis Cardinals.
I wouldn't recommend it for anyone who is not a big baseball fan, and it's probably most interesting for baseball fans who have some connection to Tony LaRussa (Cards fans, As fans, White Sox fans, and fans of other teams in the NL Central).
I learned a lot about what a manager actually does during a game, what decisions have to be made and when, and also a ton about the relationships between manager and players and manager and coaches. I blew through the book in only a couple days because it was just so s pecifically interesting to me. It's pretty well written, in general, although it has a little bit of overblownness to it at times (pretty typical for a sports book) and Bissinger referred to West Virginia University as the University of West Virginia, which is one of those things that drives me nuts. Google it. Other than that, though, it's a hard book to complain about.