Upcoming & Worth Reading

Lots of new books on the horizon which I look forward to reading in the coming year. Here's a small part of my reading list - you're probably not so interested in the fiction and natural history that I tear through. I tend to group the nonfiction I read by topic - this year I've mostly only been reading books on race, history of segregation and integration, urban African-American ethnography, and other related topics. Sociological analyses like Protecting Home are also particularly interesting to me. Here's what I'll be reading over the summer:

Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh: "In this revelatory book, Sudhir Venkatesh takes us into Maquis Park, a poor black neighborhood on Chicago's Southside, to explore the desperate, dangerous, and remarkable ways in which a community survives. We find there an entire world of unregulated, unreported, and untaxed work, a system of living off the books that is daily life in the ghetto. From women who clean houses and prepare lunches for the local hospital to small-scale entrepreneurs like the mechanic who works in an alley; from the preacher who provides mediation services to the salon owner who rents her store out for gambling parties; and from street vendors hawking socks and incense to the drug dealing and extortion of the local gang, we come to see how these activities form the backbone of the ghetto economy."

The Geography of Opportunity: Race & Housing Choice in Metropolitan America by Xavier N. De Souza Briggs & William Julius Wilson: "Many Americans think of their country as a welcoming "nation of immigrants," yet our communities have a long history of ambivalence toward new arrivals and racial minorities. This is often expressed through segregation by race and income. In this book, some of the nation’s leading analysts and advocates show shy segregation persists and how it undermines education, job prospects, and even health and safety for millions of minorities and low-income families. Calling housing "the most important invisible social policy issue in America," the book outlines and agenda to expand the geography of opportunity and assesses the political promise – and limits – of the movement for regional solutions. This project was sponsored by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University in collaboration with Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program."

Beyond Segregation: Multiracial & Multiethnic Neighborhoods in the US by Michael T. Maly: "At a time when cities appear to be fragmenting mosaics of ethnic enclaves, it is reassuring to know there are still stable multicultural neighborhoods. Beyond Segregation offers a tour of some of America's best known multiethnic neighborhoods: Uptown in Chicago, Jackson Heights (Queens), and San Antonio-Fruitvale in Oakland. Readers will learn the history of the neighborhoods and develop an understanding of the people that reside in them, the reasons they stay, and the work it takes to maintain each neighborhood as an affordable, integrated place to live."

Protecting Home: Class, Race, And Masculinity In Boys' Baseball by Sherri Grasmuck: "Through a close exploration of a boys’ baseball league in a gentrifying neighborhood of Philadelphia, sociologist Sherri Grasmuck reveals the accommodations and tensions that characterize multicultural encounters in contemporary American public life."

The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality by Thomas Shapiro: "Shapiro, coauthor of Black Wealth/White Wealth, has helped establish that the racial gap in wealth-i.e., assets, including property-is more enduring than the gap in income. That gap, a 10-fold ratio, is exemplified by what the author terms "transformative assets"-gifts, from parents and others, that work to lift succeeding generations economically and socially beyond their own achievements. Interviews with black, white and Hispanic families in Boston, Los Angeles and St. Louis show families with similar incomes living in stratified neighborhoods (and better school districts) thanks to parental help. Most of the white interviewees don't recognize the role of Shapiro's form of privilege in their lives, while middle-class blacks report far more issues with needy parents, relatives and friends. Shapiro, who holds a chair in law and social policy at Brandeis, also shows why it costs more for blacks to buy homes: discrimination in credit, higher interest rates (whites have more capacity to pay "points") and depressed home values caused by residential segregation all contribute. At the same time, Shapiro says, policies such as the federal tax break on mortgage interest perpetuates inequality by making the relatively rich richer. He proposes several class-based, tax-eased solutions at the federal level that go beyond social security: children's savings accounts; individual development accounts that match savings; and down payment accounts to help buy homes, drawn from a partial tax credit for renters. Such policies, he reminds us, would hardly be outlandish; they echo previous asset-building policies such as the Homestead Act, the GI Bill and Veterans Administration home loans."