Sacred Ground: The Chicago Streets of Timuel Black by Timuel Black as told to Susan Klonsky and edited by Bart Schultz- Just a wonderful life that is still being lived. Mr. Black lived throught the civil rights movement, the election of his friend Harold Washington, the death of his son from AIDS and the election of (and his occasionally testy relationship) with Barack Obama (according to Mr. Black, Barack Obama could not “code-switch” when he first met him). He winds up with a vigourous defense of doing oral history. (and I am still fascinated that, according to Black, Jeff Fort was invited to Richard Nixon’s inaugural ball).
...Studs always encouraged me to pursue oral history. “Those stories are out there waiting for us. Let’s go get ‘em.” To those who would consider oral history to be “soft” history, or somehow less valid, I would say, it’s the people that are left out of history whose stories we are collecting and saving. They are not emperors or movie stars, but they have stories that give us understanding. Oral history deserves the respect that is given to more classical forms and methods.
I am reading:
Genius- The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick— It’s been over a decade since I first read Gleick’s Chaos and now, reading this biography of Richard Feynman, I am reminded of why I enjoy Gleick’s writing so much; he writes for laypeople yet he pulls off not talking down to his reader. I feel as if I am learning a lot about both Feynman and the science (and there is a lot of science here!)...in a middlle of a chapter on Feynman’s time in graduate school at Princeton.
In one course, he resorted to cheating. He refused to do the daily reading and got through a routine quiz, day after day, by looking at his neighbor’s answers. English class to Feynman meant arbitrary rules about spelling and grammar, the memorization of human idiosyncrasies. It seemed like supremely useless knowledge, a parody of knowledge ought to be. Why didn’t the English professors just get together and straighten out the language?
Yes Chef: A Memoir by Marcus Samuelsson with Veronica Chambers— Now Samuelsson has worked his way up though his forst major kitchen...and enjoyed the heck out of it...some people find the vocation while, for others, their vocation finds them and Samuelsson is definitely the former.
He took the fillet knife from me and cut along the leg muscles rather than through them, lifting me out a miraculously clean bone at the end. I loved this part of my time in Switzerland. There was so much knowledge in Stocker’s team, from the top on down to the line cooks. A guy like Franz could talk smak about my Afro, my lack of brains, my mother, her alleged lack of virtue. I didn’t care because I was learning to butcher from one of the best and once that knowledge was in me, it belonged to me.
Nova by Samuel Delany