What I'm Reading Now-Same Kind of Different as Me

Same Kind of Different as Me by Ron Hall and Denver Moore with Lynn Vincent-(This is another airport find that I happened to pick up at LAX along with Gang Leader for a Day.) Okay, so, brief review (no, seriously!): Rich white guy (Ron), and his super-religious wife (Deborah), who is into volunteering at the local homeless shelter/mission, make friends at the shelter with an older black man (Denver) who used to pick cotton for The Man and is very distrustful of the husband and wife team and their motives at first. Rich white guy is constantly shocked and amazed by the grace shown him by his wife, his skeptical new friend, and the rest of the homeless shelter's...residents? shelterees? congregation? (I'm not really sure what the correct terminology is here.)

See? I told you it would be brief.

I really loved this book even though I'm not too comfortable with books about How Great God Is! It's not that I dispute it necessarily, I just don't want it shoved down my throat, and this book can be a little shove-y at times; but the husband is right there with you through the whole thing going, "I know, right? I thought my super-religious wife was crazy too!" so it all kind of worked out. Also, there were enough more subtle parts to break down my defenses. The story is told alternately from Ron and Denver's points of view, and I think that Lynn Vincent did a good job of capturing both of their voices.

When word spread at the mission that Deborah (Miss Debbie) had been diagnosed with cancer, Denver talks about how the folks at the mission took it:

There's a lot of folks come down to the mission and volunteer, but most of em was not faithful like Miss Debbie. But that wadn't all. It was the way she treated the homeless that made them accept her as their friend. She never asked em no questions, like how come you is in here? Where you been? How many times you been in jail? How come you done all them bad things in your life? She just loved em, no strings attached.

That's the way she loved me, too. The Word says God don't give us credit for lovin the folks we want to love anyway. No, He gives us credit for loving the unlovable. (...)

You know, if you ain't poor, you might think it's the folks in them big ole fine brick churches that's doin all the givin and the carin and the prayin. I wish you coulda seen all them little circles a' homeless folks with their heads bowed and their eyes closed, whisperin what was on their hearts. Seemed like they didn't have nothin to give, but they was givin what they had, takin the time to knock on God's front door and ask Him to heal this woman that had loved them.

During Deborah's stay in the hospital Ron stops by the mission. He hasn't seen Denver for a while, and he wanted to check in with him.

In the hallway to the kitchen, we ran into Chef Jim. I asked him if he'd seen Denver that day.

"He's probably sleeping." he said.

"Sleeping!" I blurted. Lazy, I thought. It was already midafternoon.

Jim raised an eyebrow. "You don't know?"

"Know what?"

"Well, when Denver heard about Miss Debbie, he told me she had a lot of friends that would be praying for her all day. But he figured she needed someone to pray all night, and he would be the one to do it."

My eyes widened as he went on. "So he goes outside at midnight, sits down next to the Dumpster, and prays for Miss Debbie and your family. When I get up and come down here at three in the morning to get breakfast going, he comes in for a cup of coffee and we pray here in the kitchen for her until about four. Then he goes back outside and prays till sunup."

Ashamed, I realized again how deep grew the roots of my own prejudice, of my arrogant snap judgments of the poor.

Yikes. How many of us have ever been in those shoes, making a snap judgment of someone because s/he's poor, rich, black, white, clearly a foreigner, clearly a native, employed, unemployed, homeless, living in a mansion, a man, a woman, married with no kids, married with kids, single with no kids, single with lots of kids, young, old, tall, short, fat, thin, in short, not like us? I know I have, and one of the things that I try to take away from a book like this is the inspiration and strength to not do things like that. In an interview at the back of the book, Denver says, "You never know whose eyes God is watchin' you through. It probably ain't gonna be your preacher and it just might be someone who was livin' like I used to." whose eyes God is watchin' you through...I never thought of it like that.

I've mentioned before that I like Anne Lamott's writing because even though she is deeply religious and believes, much like Deborah, that when you are in doubt the best thing to do is pray (which I can't really relate to at all) she still has moments of, "Seriously, God? Are you KIDDING ME???" (which I can totally relate to). That's why this book worked for me as well. Deborah and Denver both had a faith that was unshakeable, but Ron...not so much. He was skeptical, and I can relate to that, but he also witnessed some things that might be classifiable as miracles and really couldn't come up with any other explanations...which makes me willing to question my beliefs more so than anyone telling me, "You just have to have faith. Because it says so in the Bible."

Fore more information about this book, you can check out the website at http://www.samekindofdifferentasme.com/. There's a video, a calendar of Ron and Denver's speaking engagements, and other reviews and comments about the book.

Have you reviewed this book? Let me know and I'll add a link to your review.

What I'm Reading Now-Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets

This is another overdue review that I am now up-to-date on thanks to all the Weekly Geeks who asked me questions about it. I'm glad they did too because a lot of the questions that people asked are probably not the questions I would have thought to address otherwise.

Cover via Amazon

Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets by Sudhir Venkatesh-I thought this book was fascinating. This was another airport find, and it was a good one. Many weekly geeks had similar questions. Eva from A Striped Armchair asked, "Was Gang Leader for a Day intellectual? Or did the author make lots of questionable assumptions/conclusions? (I wasn't a fan of Freakonomics, so if you've read that, do you think I'd enjoy this one?)" I didn't read Freakonomics, so I can't really compare the two, but I felt like the information that was being presented was pretty sound. Mostly it was the author's real-life experiences, but he also presented some background information about the area that he was researching to bring together a bigger picture of how a decision on the city level, to tear down a housing project for example, affected not only the residents of that community on an individual level but also the gang structure within that community and other neighboring communities as well.

Kim of Sophisticated Dorkiness wanted to know if I thought "the author was able to keep his objectivity when writing about his experience? And how well did he balance storytelling with facts and figures to give some context about what his experience meant?" and Jennie at Biblio File wondered, "Is Gang Leader for a Day an overly academic book, or is it written for a more general audience?"

First of all, I don't think this is an overly academic book at all, and it is totally accessible to a general audience. If you're pushing this one aside because it sounds too much like school work, you're missing out. It's not all facts and figures and statistics at all, in fact, I think that was sort of the point of the book. He set out to find people to fill out surveys, to gather the data, to get the facts and figures; what he found out was that that information is useless if you don't understand why. Why are these people poor? Why don't they have jobs? Why don't they just move to a better neighborhood? Why do they put up with gang activity where they live? Why do women sell their bodies? Why don't they just apply for government aid?

...which brings me around to Kim's question. I don't know if the author was able to remain entirely objective; he did a good job of trying to stay neutral and objective, but he was writing largely about his experience hanging out IN A GANG. He was not a gang member; he was a nice boy from California who was in grad school, trying to gather some good information on poverty to impress his professors. Some subjectivity is going to creep in. He did try to assess things objectively, but in order to actually gain any valuable information, he had to get personally involved, not only with the gang leader, JT, but with the tenants of the building that JT's gang lived in, JT's family, the leader of the local Boys & Girls Club. As he found out, walking into the midst of a gang with a questionnaire full of questions like, How does it feel to be black and poor? wasn't really an effective way to gain useful information about people living in poverty. After the author spent an angsty night being held captive in a stairwell by the members of JT's gang, the Black Kings, JT's advice was:

"Go back to where you came from," he told me, "and be more careful when you walk around the city." Then, as I began gathering up my bag and clipboard, he talked to me about the proper way to study people. "You shouldn't go around asking them silly-ass questions," he said. "With people like us, you should hang out, get to know what they do, how they do it. No one is going to answer questions like that. You need to understand how young people live on the streets."

And that's what he did. For about 10 years, Sudhir hung out with JT, getting to know the members of the Black Kings, finding out why people would join a gang, put up with a gang selling drugs in their building, why police officers often showed up to mediate gang disputes rather than throwing as many gang members in jail as they could.

This isn't a book about how many youth are dropping out of high school and joining gangs each year and what percentage get arrested and how that percentage correlates to average yearly income, etc. If you've ever wondered why you can't just take a gang off the street and get them out of a neighborhood read this book. They are so insidiously woven into the neighborhoods that they are involved in, at least big organizations like the Black Kings were. The gangs sell drugs in the lobby of the apartment building, but in return they give money to the building president so that she can buy supplies for the children in the building. They cook crack in the vacant apartments, but they provide protection from abusive boyfriends to the women who live in the building. JT requires all of his gang members to receive a high school diploma or GED, and they are not allowed to use drugs. So, he keeps them in school and off drugs for the privilege of selling drugs, earning money, and rising up the ranks within the gang. Crime is kept to a minimum because if the cops come around, the drug business gets interrupted and people lose money, and people don't want to lose money...

which brings us around to what Trisha at Eclectic/Eccentric wanted to know, "...what did you think of Gang Leader for a Day? Was it an honest look at life in a gang or was it more of a kitchy book - was the author just interested in sensationalism?" I thought that this was a pretty honest look at things. It wasn't overdone with gang shootings and people shooting up on drugs or anything like that. Those elements were present, but they weren't as prominent as you might think, and they were presented as a realistic part of the everyday life, not just as the next sensational thing the author witnessed. The title comes from a day when the author is giving JT a hard time about his role as gang leader. He essentially says, "How hard can it be? You go around, you talk to people, you make arrangements for things; I could do that," and JT gives him the reigns to be in charge for a day, to handle all the things that he has to handle every day, and Sudhir realizes that there's more to being a gang leader than just being a thug. You can watch a clip of the author talking a little more about this here.

I don't want to say that this book glamorizes gang life, but it does present the human side of it, makes you see that just because someone is in a gang doesn't mean they are a bad person. It explores the reality of living in poverty, living in a gang, surrounded by a gang, protected by a gang, threatened by a gang. Also, if you're someone who can't stomach hearing (or reading) the N-word, this book is not for you. It is used with abandon because that's how it is used on the street. It's not pretty but neither is real life sometimes.

Thanks to everyone who asked me questions about this book. I hope I answered all of them. If not, feel free to ask me more. It's been a couple months now since I read it, so I didn't have a lot of quotes or examples top-of-mind, but my overall impression was that this is a book I would definitely recommend.

What I'm Reading Now-August 15th edition

I wanted to break this up and do a separate post from my August 14th post for two reasons.

1) These are long-ass posts when I do them all together.

2) I felt like the subject matter of the previous reviews should have it's own post.

So, continuing on, here's more on my latest reads:

Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones -I picked up this book because Michael over at Books on the Nightstand raved about it in a podcast and Ann followed up with a positive review as well; it's a book I would have probably been interested in but never actually read otherwise. I bought it in the airport at Sydney, not realizing that the author is a native of New Zealand and the book was published in Australia, so that was a nice surprise to find that I had a book that was somewhat relevant to my travels.

To summarize quickly (I know I'm not good at this, but I'll try!), it's about a group of island children who are introduced to Charles Dickens' Great Expectations by their new teacher who reads the book aloud to them in class each day, bringing to life a whole new world, completely unlike anything any of them have ever experienced. They live somewhere in the South Pacific, close to Australia from what I could gather, perhaps New Zealand, but I don't think a location was ever specified. There is a civil war of sorts going on (perhaps if I were up on my world history I would have been able to figure out where this takes place) and the book takes a rather dark turn that I hadn't expected. The narrator is Matilda, one of the students, and she is enthralled, fascinated by Great Expectations, particularly it's main character, Pip. As Pip becomes more real to her than her culture's beloved ancestors, more real than God Himself, Matilda's mother becomes increasingly uncomfortable with Mr. Watts, the new teacher, and his chosen material which leads to unfortunate circumstances colliding to create a misunderstanding between the islanders and enemy soldiers, and things go downhill from there. The book is basically broken up into two parts, Matilda's life on the island before things go bad and Matilda's grown-up years, off-island, after.

I have very mixed feelings about this book. I wanted to love it since it had received such rave reviews, but, honestly, I kept forgetting that I was reading it. It wasn't that it was bad, it just wasn't anything I was ever excited about getting back to. I would be looking around the house, going, "I need a new book to read," and then I would see this book and go, "Oh yeah, I'm already reading a book." At the same time, I think it is worth reading, and I feel like there are a lot of things right below the surface of this one that I am just missing, like if I just sat down and really thought about it for an hour or so I could get all my thoughts together and come up with a great appreciation for its profound nature. Matilda is who she is in large part because of Mr. Watts, her teacher, and Mr. Watts is a complex character whose story takes an unexpected twist. It's hard to say too much about this without giving things away. I'd say go ahead and give it a read. It's an easy read, and I can see how it has the potential to be a book that you would really love. I may have to go back and re-read the second half again.

Bonus! Mr. Watts asks the adults of the village to come to class to share their knowledge. They can talk about anything they want, whatever they know about, and at one point Matilda's mother talks about the digging habits of beach crabs. She imparts this wisdom:

"'Wind and rain are on the way if a crab digs straight down and blocks the hole with sand leaving marks like sunrays. We can expect strong winds but no rain if a crab leaves behind a pile of sand but does not cover the hole.

'If the crab blocks the hole but does not scrape the mound flat there will be rain but no wind. When the crab leaves the sand piled up and the hole unblocked the weather will be fine. Never trust a white who says, "According to the radio rain is on the way." Trust crabs first and above all others.'" I think that's pretty sage advice. Now I will have to do some reconnaissance work and see if Hawaii crabs follow the same rules. Don't hold your breath waiting for the results though.

So, for the readers who found my blog by searching for "why do hawaii beach crabs dig holes" and "sideway sand shuffle crabs" perhaps this would be a good book for you to read! Or, perhaps not since I just told you all that it says about crabs.

**Updated 6/2/09 to include

Other reviews (many much more well-researched than mine):

Chris--Book-a-Rama

Chartroose-Bloody Hell, It's a Book Barrage!

Marg at Reading Adventures
Heather J. at Age 30+... A Lifetime of Books

Getting Started in Value Investing by Charles Mizrahi-Finally! I have been trying to read this book since...well, let's see, it was due back to the library on July 29th when my renewal expired...yeah, I'm THAT person, ok?? I'm not proud of it, but the library gets their money from me, so it's all good in the end. (Also, I had to share it with the cat, and he's a slow reader-all that math wears him out.) I'm sure that Mr. Mizrahi would say that paying $7.50 (my library's maximum late fee for an overdue book) for a library book is not a good example of value investing, but I'm not claiming to be his star pupil here. I almost didn't read this book (on several occasions) but I'm really glad that I did. I think it offers a lot of good advice, it breaks down a lot of the confusion about all those numbers you see on financial statements, and it does it all in layman's terms.
Mizrahi tells you how to look at a company and decide if it is a good investment, meaning if you put money into it, will it be worth it in the long haul. He is not talking about playing the market, he's talking about investing Warren Buffet-style and watching your investment grow over the years. There are a lot of common sense things that sort of correlate with how I've been choosing companies to invest in thus far, which made me feel like I'm not a complete moron and I do have a good general sense of what I'm doing...sort of.
I like to invest in companies that I like, companies that I would want to own, which is basically what you are doing when you buy stock in a company. Yeah, I could make lots of money in big oil or pharmaceuticals, but I'd feel icky about owning them. Not that there aren't some great aspects about both, but overall, it's just not my bag. Also, I want to be able to understand what a company does-Starbucks sells coffee, Home Depot sells building materials, Bank of America lends money, etc. I have a basic understanding of how they make their money, and that's another thing that the author and Mr. Buffet both advocate. If you can't figure out what they do or how they earn their money, don't invest in them!

Another piece of advice that Mizrahi gives is buy companies that are doing well and have a history of doing well. If they are not currently doing well, see if you can figure out why-did they have some huge capital expense this year, like equipment upgrades, that is draining all their cash but should result in better figures next year, or are they on their way out of business because they can't compete in their market? I think now is a tricky time to be trying to figure this out since virtually everyone is experiencing lower revenues in the current economy, so current figures aren't necessarily going to be representative of historical figures, but there should be some standout companies that are able to weather even the current economic storm, and those are the ones that you invest in!

Where I perhaps haven't been doing the best job, and where a lot of people get hung up, is picking stocks that are not overvalued. The author lays out a detailed process for figuring out what you should pay for a stock and explains it all very clearly, but I'm still a little confused about this part. I made an Excel spreadsheet and typed in all the numbers they gave in the example in the book, and I got my answer to match their answer, so I knew all of my formulas were right, but I'm just not convinced that I'm plugging in the right numbers, and that was the only problem I had with this book. For most of the examples he gives, Mizrahi has corresponding financial statements or bits of financial statements so you can see where he is pulling numbers from, but for this part, he just tells you what the numbers are for the given company, and I'm not sure that I'm not calling something by one name when on a financial statement it goes by another name. Google and Reuters team up nicely to provide financial information about companies (as an example, go to Google Finance, type in GOOG and hit "Get quotes." Now you can see Google's stock info. If you scroll down you will see "Financials" and "Key Stats and Ratios." Click on the "More ratios from Reuters" link and you get this. Between these two sources, you should be able to find all the numbers you need to come up with a valuation for a stock, but don't do dumb things like I did and enter the "EPS (TTM) vs TTM 1 Yr. Ago" figure (29.33) in your spreadsheet where you should be entering the EPS (15.22) or it will be wonky beyond belief. See, if you're scratching your head going, "What the hell does all THAT mean?" then you should read this book. By the time you get done, you will actually know!) Where was I? Oh yeah, Google and Reuters team nicely, but every once in a while you run across a company for which this information is not available (I think this tends to be for foreign entities), so then you have to go find the company's annual report and look at their financial statements on your own. While the basic layout and accounting principles should be the same, each one is still unique in its own way, and that's where I run into problems, especially when dealing with foreign terminology. Does this count as revenue? Should I count that as a capital expense? Do I need to know gross revenue, operational revenue or net revenue for this calculation? So, I don't know. There is still a lot for me to learn, but I feel like I learned A LOT from this book, and I now have a good basis to build on. Speaking of investing, I might actually invest in this book since I think it would be one that I would refer back to frequently, and I think the advice will remain pretty timeless.

What I'm Reading Now-July 2nd edition

Well, as you can see, my wheel of books has not changed significantly since my last post. I did finish The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals which I did enjoy even though it was a long read. It was thoughtful and thorough and provided a lot of good information. It's very easy for people to take frivolous political stands about being meat-eaters or vegetarians or vegans, but I think Michael Pollan did a good job of evaluating the different considerations of these various stands. It's not as cut-and-dry as we would all like to think it is, especially for those of us lucky enough to be living in a place like the United States, where food, and food choices, are, for the most part, abundant. Pollan does end up creating a meal that he has hunted, gathered, and grown on his own. While proving that it can indeed be done, he makes no bones about the fact that it isn't a very realistic expectation for most people. Anyway, long story short, I would recommend this book.

Backyard Giants: The Passionate, Heartbreaking, and Glorious Quest to Grow the Biggest Pumpkin Ever by Susan Warren-I loved this book! Remember how I said that, "I like reading about gardening and huge undertakings by inspired visionaries." No? Well, I did. In my review of A Clearing in the Distance. This book was all the things I wanted that book to be. Okay, maybe growing giant pumpkins isn't the same as designing Central Park, but it's something. The book was a quick, easy read, and it provided me with a lot of interesting facts. Did you know that pumpkins can put on up to 40 lbs. of weight a day? I didn't think so. And neither did I before I read this book. Backyard Giants follows a group of growers, mostly in Rhode Island, through a pumpkin-growing season, during which they are attempting to break the 1,500 lb. goal. That's right, 1,500 POUNDS. Go outside and look at your car. Now, imagine it's a pumpkin. Impressive, right? Anyway, it mostly follows a father-son team, but also incorporates all the folks in their growing club as well. These are regular Joes, people who work for a living and tend to their pumpkins the rest of the time. They help each other out, they cheer each other on, they wrap their pumpkins in blankets at night. I was laughing, crying and cheering throughout this book. Pick it up and give it a read. If nothing else, it provides you with great material for small talk.

Why Courage Matters: The Way to a Braver Life by John McCain and Marshall Salter-I feel bad not giving this book a rave review, but it was just ok. I had a hard time with McCain's writing style. To be fair, I guess it could have been Marshall Salter's style that I had a problem with and not John McCain's. It wasn't complex, but I often had to go back and re-read sentences several times to figure out what he had just said. I think McCain felt awkward about writing this book, and it sort of showed. While I liked his humility and candor, I felt like he felt obligated to write a book when perhaps a short paper would have sufficed. He tells several stories about brave and courageous folks who are certainly worthy of our admiration and provide much inspiration. He talks about how we tend to over use the word "courage" these days, thereby devaluing real courage. Sure, it might be painful or scary to talk about your struggle with weight or make a public speech, but is it really courageous? Can you really put that in the same category as running back into a jungle full of enemy soldiers to retrieve the body of a fallen comrade when you're already injured, out of ammo, and outnumbered 10-to-1? He talks about moral courage and setting examples for our children. Overall, the message was good, but I don't think the book was great.

Water for Elephants: A Novel by Sara Gruen-This is one I've picked up a dozen times over the years but was never quite convinced that it would be as good as I wanted it to be. I finally had a couple rave reviews from close friends and picked it up in the airport on my way home from DC. I loved this book. It had elephants and romance and the circus and trains and beloved pets and sweet, sweet justice. What more could you ask for? The main character, Jacob, runs away and, without really meaning to, joins the circus as their resident vet. He meets and immediately falls in love with the beautiful Marlena who is married to August. August is in charge of the animals and is a bit psychotic. August is also Jacob's new boss. You can see where this is going, right? Nowhere good.

This is a depression-era novel, and circuses are going out of business like crazy. The owner of the circus that Jacob has fallen in with is a shrewd businessman and manages to pick up defunct circus assets in his travels. In this way, they gain the new star of their show, Rosie, the elephant. Rosie is gentle but doesn't seem to know anything. Between the general hit of the depression and August's non-performing elephant, the circus is falling on hard times. Employees aren't getting paid, and the owner isn't averse to "red-lighting," tossing people off the train during its night-time travels to avoid...problems. Things eventually pick up, Rosie gets in the game, but she still makes mistakes that send August into psychotic rages, much to everyone's distress.

At the very beginning of the book, we learn what we think is the big secret that Jacob has been keeping all these years, and the book works its way back around to this calamitous moment, during which even more is revealed, and I have to say I was surprised. I thought I knew where it was going, but I didn't. Jacob is now an old man in a nursing home, and the story goes back and forth between his days in the circus and his days in the nursing home. The circus has come to town, and so begins his reminiscing. I liked both endings of this book-the ending to the story that Jacob is telling and the ending of Jacob's current-day story. This was also a quick, easy read.

**Edited 3/31/09 to add

Other reviews:

Jackie-Farm Lane Book Blogs

Marg at Reading Adventures

Wilderness Tips by Margaret Atwood-Margaret Atwood is one of those authors I feel compelled to like. I've read a couple of her books and thought they were ok, but I don't recall being bowled over by any of them. People always rave about her, and every couple years I think that maybe I've matured enough to finally appreciate Margaret Atwood like I am supposed to. Apparently, this isn't the case. I still think she's ok. Wilderness Tips is a book of short stories...*sigh*. I feel compelled to try to like short stories too. I just can't think of any short story that I've ever read and gone, "Wow!" And, again, this makes me feel like a literary 12-year-old. So, anyway, I've got this book of short stories by Margaret Atwood...and so far, it's ok. Actually, at the end of one of her stories, "Hairball," I did go, "Wow," but it was "Wow, that's kinda f*cked up," not "Wow! I've got to tell other people to read this!" I'm about half-way through; I'll let you know my final verdict.