Here are the facts:
On March 3, 1943, a crush occurred at the entry to the Bethnal Green underground air raid shelter. 173 people were killed. No bombs fell on the city that night. News of the crush was kept secret for days, then a private investigation was led by a magistrate named Laurence Dunne. The government suppressed his report until after the war.

The rest of the book is fiction about the event and the resulting report. It is a skillful and absorbing look at the meaning of tragedy and its consequences.

Robinson is a frequent guest on the Rachel Maddow Show, which I listen to as an audio podcast fairly frequently, and I usually like what he has to say.

The main point of the book is that there is not one “Black America,” which to me seems like a “no duh” sort of thing because there’s not one “White America” either, but Americans are notoriously bad about talking about class so perhaps this point hasn’t been made clear. Anyway, he identifies four components of Black America – the Mainstream, the Abandoned, the Transcendent, and the Emergent – and makes a good point that statistics would paint a better picture of the real situation in America if race wasn’t treated as one homogeneous block.

The Mainstream are the black middle class, while the Abandoned are those living in poverty. The Transcendents are people like Oprah, whose influence transcends race, and the Emergent consists of mixed-race people and immigrants from Africa. I thought the Emergents were the most interesting group and wish he’d spent more time on that. I also question his lumping together the two groups into one.

To sum up: somewhat interesting, but not as fascinating as I find him to be in media appearances.

What is it about books about dystopian futures that appeals to me so?

I haven’t read much YA; even when I was a teen I mostly read adult fiction and non-fiction.

Bipolar II: Enhance Your Highs, Boost Your Creativity, and Escape the Cycles of Recurrent Depression – The Essential Gudie to Recognize and Treat the Mood Swings of This Increasingly Common Disorder, Ronald R. Fieve, M.D.
The dude could have used an editor (if you couldn’t guess that from the title). I should have skipped everything except chapters 8 and 10.

Addictive, but really cruel at times.

This really is the full list of books I’ve read since the last time I posted. Those of you who knew me well can infer what this means about my life during that time.

So, to keep busy, I have been working on projects. I found a great furniture building blog via an article in Fresh Home magazine, and last weekend I made shelves.

The pillows on the shelf were my great-aunt Harriet’s, and are a notable exception to my general lack of sentimentality about objects. However, the dog on the couch has a tendency to occasionally mistake pillows for stuffies, so the pillows had been in a closet since he adopted me. This shelf was perfect for displaying them at a safe height so now I can enjoy the company of both.

A happy accident was that the leftover wood from making this shelf was exactly the right size to make a spice shelf for the kitchen:

This shelf is awesome. Putting the spices there (again, out of the reach of a certain Labrador) really makes cooking easier and frees up a lot of space in my tiny pantry.

The weather here has cooled off some and as a result I want to eat soup all the time. Consider this an unsolicited endorsement of these soups from the Vegan Yum Yum cookbook: black bean soup, spicy tomato-chickpea soup, creamy broccoli dal.