Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

  In 1932, when Nazi planners were devising a plan that would lead to the marginalization, denigration, disenfranchisement, and eventual elimination of its Jewish citizens, they modeled their efforts on how America marked its black citizens in such a way that they could not be full members of American society. Nearly 70 years after slavery was outlawed, Black Americans could not attend white schools, eat in white restaurants, drink from white water fountains, swim in white pools, live in white neighborhoods, walk on a sidewalk if a white was approaching, or speak back to a white person in any way other than deferential. Failure to adhere to the rules of American white superiority could result in summary execution by mobs of self-appointed upholders of white law. More than 4,000 blacks were lynched. American segregation was the perfect model for Nazism and somehow I never learned that in school. What Caste  makes clear is that race, or more accurately, skin color was an arbitra...

 " Either you master your circumstances, or your circumstances will master you. " Soon after the Russian Revolution in 1917, Bolshevik authorities convicted the former aristocrat, Count Alexander Rostov, of crimes against the newly formed government. He wrote a poem critical of the authorities. Instead of martyring Rostov, they ascribed a punishment fit to a Russian, internal exile. Rostov was put under house arrest in Moscow's finest hotel, the Metropol .  The Piazza, one of the Metropol's dining rooms. Rostov remained inside for the next 32 years, but throughout his stay maintained unrivaled equanimity, erect posture, impeccable manners, exquisite taste in fine wines and elegant cuisine, and erudite allusions to the world's great literatures and philosophies. In short, while Stalinism and three decades of the Russian revolution played before him from the 1920s through the 1950s, Count Rostov's triumph was his ability to master his circumstances, providing a ...

On the up side, The Missing American  captures Accra, Ghana in 2019. The vitality of a city bursting with a swelling population, new buildings begin constructed so quickly that potholed, unpaved roads don't match their shiny exteriors, incapacitating traffic, and street hawkers selling a WalMart of plenty. Also, the inside look at cybercrime is illuminating. We all remember the days when Nigerian princes emailed us asking for money; now, sakawa  boys of Ghana have advanced their digital scams with great sophistication and it's fun to learn how they do it. After extracting money from susceptible patrons in the global north they using their profits to pay fetish priests to imbue them with additional money making powers, to corrupt everyone from local police to major politicians, and naturally to purchase really flashy cars. On the down side, Emma Djian, Ghana's 26-year-old, virginal (yes, that seems important that the author let us know), crime fighter whose only personal int...