Postville - A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America - Stephen Bloom

People are weird. Society just amplifies our weirdness. Take us out of our normal microcosm and dump us elsewhere, and we can be aliens to our own race of humankind. Postville is, or was, a sleepy little farming town in Iowa. A dinky, inbred but friendly burg, much like the one I grew up in. In 1987, this all changed. A group of Lubavitcher Hassidic Jews bought the rendering plant outside the town and set up shop to become on of the largest kosher slaughterhouses in the world. And all hell broke loose. On the surface, it seems like a battle between us and them. The newcomers rudely swarm into town. Instead of starting at the bottom rung, like most "immigrants", they instead installed themselves at the top of the food chain. On the other far spectrum are the usual small-minded anti-Semites. However, it is those in the middle that make for the most interesting read. Many of the residents of Postville initially welcomed the Jews and the slaughterhouse. They were friendly and outgoing, inviting the new neighbors over and enthusiastically supporting the new jobs created. This changed in a short time.

Stephen Bloom, a very reform Jew (please pass the bacon, thanks) and a professor at Iowa U was the perfect author for this book. Describing his own discomfort with being a Jew out of water (?) in a small town where it is assumed everyone is a Christian, he eagerly drove out to Postville to meet some of his own people. What he found was a brewing battle between the residents of Postville and the Lubavitchers. The townspeople told him of their dissatisfaction with the Jews - they didn’t mow their lawns, parked their cars in the middle of the street or drove on the sidewalk, tried to haggle in stores - but most importantly, weren’t neighborly and rebuffed all attempts at friendship. At first, Bloom is convinced that this is a vein of anti-Semitism. He goes out to meet the Lubavitchers. In short order, the owner of the plant tells Bloom that he waits way past due dates to pay bills, doesn’t want anything to do with the townspeople and is irritated that they don’t understand the obvious superiority (both financially and religiously) of their community. Fascinated by the increasing dissatisfaction, Bloom follows the workings of the town as the townspeople decide to take action and vote to annex the land the slaughterhouse is in, in hopes of driving out, or at least controlling, the Lubavtichers’ operations. A really excellently written book, balanced and tight. Bloom’s own story and position make it all the more interesting.

The Celebration Chronicles - Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Property Values in Disney’s New Town - Andrew Ross

We Americans like describing ourselves as pragmatic realists - capitalists who make cold, shrewd decisions based on the market and the value of a dollar stretched as thin as possible. However, conjure up visions of white picket fences, front porches, little Susie on her bike and mom making apple pie and all but the most hard-core of us will turn squishy at the knees. And there is no company on the earth to inject dreams and desires into the average Joe than the magical company of Disney. And boy do they know it. The Disney-backed planned town of Celebration has become a microcosm study of American ideals created in a made-to-order community. In the mid-90s, Disney announced with great fanfare that they would be creating a Utopic planned community on Disney property. It would have state-of-the-art schools, a perfect downtown, sidewalks and parks to reduce driving and beautiful planned architecture based on Victorian, Mediterranean and other classic styles. It would, in short, rock. Lots were snapped up for 30% above market value within no time. And then the fun began. Andrew Ross, a journalist for The Village Voice and The Nation, moved into Celebration for a year to chronicle the journey of the town. While much had been written about the town, most of it had been either wildly negative in an Orwellian vein, or glowing with pixie dust and hope.

There is something about the phrase "Utopia" that makes my skin crawl. Ross describes this perfectly in his introduction, as he describes the literature for Celebration:

Few of the people standing in line had seen anything like a detailed rendering of a house, let along a floor plan. They had been drawn there by gilded rumor and a boffo adverting campaign that often read like scenes from a Ray Bradbury story stripped of all the stuff that makes your scalp stiffen.

Off and running on this happy note, Ross covers the highs and lows of his visit and subsequent interviews with numerous visits - the few successes and the numerous failures in the school, town rules, government and miserable building conditions. Along the way he covers a good chunk of Utopian urban planning and its history (Why, no Mr. Wright, I don’t think people will be fine in houses without closets). A most interesting point he makes is that perhaps the idealized utopian community - based on a vision of the 1950s a la Norman Rockwell will never truly succeed because half the population were in a sense slaves in/to their own homes - and have no desire to return to this imagined wonderland. A short riff on feminism and Stepford Wives made for a great aside. He also makes forays into the history of Florida itself, zoning regulations (Disney has the rights to build their own nuclear power reactor, should they want to. No, really) and the effect of Disney on the neighboring communities. I commend Ross for his evenhanded descriptions of Utopia, though somehow I doubt the current residents, fixated on appearance and property value, will appreciate his clear-headed candor. Ah well, maybe someday they will wipe the pixie dust from their eyes and try living in a real town.

Utopia - Lincoln Child

And speaking of Utopia…. We just so happened to be listening to Lincoln Child’s thriller in the car. This is a perfect summer beach read - fast-paced, exiting, lots of techie-details, (eat yer heart of Crichton) and interesting likeable characters. Utopia, the wondrous amusement park of the future, is described so clearly it seems a shame it doesn’t really exist. Satisfyingly long and rich with plot and detail.

Hungry Planet - What the World Eats - Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio

Menzel and D’Aluisio, authors of The Material World have created yet another fascinating collection of photos, stories and statistics from around the world. While The Material World focused on the material possessions of households around the world, this collection focuses on the diet and foods of everyday families. Families are photographed with a week’s worth of food, along with a general description of calorie intake for their country, expenditure of food, number of McDonald’s in the country and other related statistics. Menzel manages to capture the human essence of the families and their everyday struggles to provide and cook healthy food. The family I found most interesting was the small family in Greenland, off on a hunting trip in sub-zero weather to fish. Other fascinating groups include Cubans, living off their monthly stipend from the government, the "eat it if it moves" southern Chinese, and the citizens of Okinawa, which boasts the highest rate of 100+ year old residents in the world. While American/pre-processed packaged food shows up in most of the countries, it is refreshing to hear of some families that either grow all their own food and shop only locally, purposefully shunning pre-packaged food, and others who simply cannot wrap their mind around people who do not have their own gardens. Sadly, there are other families, like one in Mexico, that are baffled by their family obesity, tooth decay and diabeties, which not surprisingly seems to have come about around the time the family opened a small bodega and started drinking gallons of Coke a week. Also not surprising is the truly terrifying sight if an average American families grocery run - a few sad veggies sticking out between the chip bags. A great read or skim-through and a great incentive to go check out some cookbooks from the library! Maybe I’ll review some of them next month…

Death on the Nile - Agatha Christie

Do you know why Agatha Christie is such a popular writer? Because she is a damn good one, that’s why. I know I read all of her books in high school, but had forgotten how really excellent they are. The plots are tight and detailed, characters are full and rounded out. Unlike many of the modern murder mysteries that I have read, the plot details don't stick out like red herrings. The characters have strong feeling and personalities created in a few short pages - something which many of the modern authors can’t seem to do even through a series of books. This is by far one of the most popular of Christie’s, as well it should be. A great reread if it has been awhile and a perfect introduction to the queen of murder for neophytes.