Bob Schieffer's America
Author: Bob Schieffer
Unbridged CDs • 6 CDs, 7 hours
Wise, rueful, candid, graceful commentaries from one of journalism's most stylish and respected writers.
Publishers Weekly
Veteran CBS newsman and Frontline anchor Schieffer (This Just In) compiles 168 essays spanning his career from the Nixon administration to the present day. He reminisces about the pretelevision era when politicians "had to be entertaining to hold a crowd"; with tongue-in-cheek rhetoric, the author creates his own exploratory committee because "everyone else seems to be doing it.... and people for some reason send them million of dollars." In a critique of the current administration, Schieffer laments that "we had elected an administration that feared the future." The hypocrisy of American foreign policy is brought to the forefront in a discussion about democracy, war and the loss of humanity in politics. As an ardent fan of human interest journalism, comic personal writing and America, Schieffer portrays citizens optimistically while harshly criticizing the current policies in Washington. Schieffer's ruminations are appealing (though hardly groundbreaking), but a choppy organization and a tendency toward repetition and overemphasis on a few themes detract from an otherwise humorous, albeit simple, collection of essays. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Lance Eaton - Library Journal
EmmyA Award-winning CBS newsman Schieffer has witnessed many of our nation's greatest and saddest moments. In this collection of brief essays and commentary, he shares what he considers to be his most relevant and timeless writings. Some are poignant; others call forth grins (a self-identified "independent," Schieffer unhesitatingly attacks both parties while also scrutinizing the current state of political affairs). With its hint of rasp, Schieffer's mature voice simultaneously evokes a bit of crotchetiness, hope, and bemusement. But his habit of ending at a soft volume may render the last word or two of his sentences inaudible for some listeners. Nonetheless, many are sure to agree with his take on America. [Audio clip available through
Kirkus Reviews
Broadcast journalist Schieffer (This Just In: What I Couldn't Tell You on TV, 2002, etc.) collects his Sunday commentaries from Face the Nation. A few sentences about the death of Richard Nixon in 1994 launched this popular feature, which has been a fixture of the program ever since. Culled from the many hundreds written by Schieffer, 170 essays cover politics, family, history and prominent people. They have more meat than a sound bite yet remain short and pithy. Occasionally the author will come out of left field with some pleasing illumination a la Andy Rooney. At other times, he turns up the acerbity in the mode of his mentor Eric Sevareid. "Congress ran to the airport Friday," he snaps. "They're taking two weeks this year for Thanksgiving. I wouldn't ask how many days you're taking because that would be a digression." But mostly Schieffer displays an avuncular progressivism, wondering where the good, old-fangled virtues of decency, honesty and doing no harm to the innocent have gone in our political life, while finding these values still vigorous in the nation's citizenry. He gives credit where it is due, appreciatively noting Ronald Reagan's understanding "that winning an argument does not have to mean destroying your opponent," and he admits to doubts and remorse, as in his evolving opinion about the course and conduct of the Iraq war. Sometimes he simply shares his love for something, a good book, perhaps, or gently serves some advice worth the minute it takes to tell: "when I think of the stories I've missed, it was usually because I wasn't listening when someone was trying to tell me something."Insightful nuggets that express a worldview, an ethical system and a newsman'scode of conduct.
Go to: Économie Directoriale dans une Économie globale
Sidewalk
Author: Mitchell Duneier
An exceptional ethnography marked by clarity and candor, Sidewalk takes us into the socio-cultural environment of those who, though often seen as threatening or unseemly, work day after day on “the blocks” of one of New York’s most diverse neighborhoods. Sociologist Duneier, author of Slim’s Table, offers an accessible and compelling group portrait of several poor black men who make their livelihoods on the sidewalks of Greenwich Village selling secondhand goods, panhandling, and scavenging books and magazines.
Duneier spent five years with these individuals, and in Sidewalk he argues that, contrary to the opinion of various city officials, they actually contribute significantly to the order and well-being of the Village. An important study of the heart and mind of the street, Sidewalk also features an insightful afterword by longtime book vendor Hakim Hasan. This fascinating study reveals today’s urban life in all its complexity: its vitality, its conflicts about class and race, and its surprising opportunities for empathy among strangers.
Sidewalk is an excellent supplementary text for a range of courses:
INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY: Shows how to make important links between micro and macro; how a research project works; how sociology can transform common sense.
RACE AND ETHNIC RELATIONS: Untangles race, class, and gender as they work together on the street.
URBAN STUDIES: Asks how public space is used and contested by men and women, blacks and whites, rich and poor, and how street life and political economyinteract.
DEVIANCE: Looks at labeling processes in treatment of the homeless;
interrogates the “broken windows” theory of policing.
LAW AND SOCIETY: Closely examines the connections between formal and informal systems of social control.
METHODS: Shows how ethnography works; includes a detailed methodological appendix and an afterword by research subject Hakim Hasan.
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: Sidewalk engages the rich terrain of recent developments regarding representation, writing, and authority; in the tradition of Elliot Liebow and Ulf Hannerz, it deals with age old problems of the social and cultural experience of inequality; this is a telling study of culture on the margins of American society.
CULTURAL STUDIES: Breaking down disciplinary boundaries, Sidewalk shows how books and magazines are received and interpreted in discussions among working-class people on the sidewalk; it shows how cultural knowledge is deployed by vendors and scavengers to generate subsistence in public space.
SOCIOLOGY OF CULTURE: Sidewalk demonstrates the connections between culture and human agency and innovation; it interrogates distinctions between legitimate subcultures and deviant collectivities; it illustrates conflicts over cultural diversity in public space; and, ultimately, it shows how conflicts over meaning are central to social life.
Salon - Andrew O'Hehir
Almost at the very beginning of Mitchell Duneier's extraordinary study of the black men who sell scavenged books and magazines on the streets of New York's Greenwich Village, we learn that these men are not necessarily what they seem at first glance. Duneier, a sociologist who has taught at the University of Wisconsin and the University of California at Santa Barbara, approaches Hakim Hasan, a man he has recently met who sells "black books" from a table on Sixth Avenue, to ask him how he understands his role on the street. "I'm a public character," Hasan responds. "A what?" Duneier asks. "Have you ever read Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities?" Hasan answers. "You'll find it in there."
Admittedly, most of the men Duneier meets on Sixth Avenue cannot trump the visiting academic by citing chapter and verse from classic texts of social science. (There are other moments of peculiar disjunction, as when one homeless man who usually sleeps in a subway tunnel observes to Duneier that the quality of Architectural Digest has gone downhill since its purchase by Conde Nast.) But the presence of someone like Hasan, an erudite thinker who voluntarily dropped out of the formal economy to work on the street, helped Duneier understand that the world of sidewalk vending was a highly complex socioeconomic sphere with its own rules, hierarchies and sense of order. In bringing that world to his readers with tremendous humility and integrity, Duneier has written what is sure to become a contemporary classic of urban sociology.
Many observers, especially amid the "quality of life" rhetoric of Rudy Giuliani's mayoralty, are likely to view the tables of second-hand bestsellers and discarded fashion magazines -- and the men behind them -- as ugly and undesirable chaos, likely to produce crime and disorder. Over the course of the five years Duneier spent observing and even working on "the blocks" (as the vendors term their desirable stretch of Village sidewalk), he developed a different view. While several of the men he introduces to the readers of Sidewalk are alcoholics and drug addicts, and some (although not most) are homeless, almost all, as Duneier eloquently puts it, are trying "to live 'better' lives within the framework of their own and society's weaknesses."
After becoming friendly with Hasan -- who is neither homeless nor an addict and seems to function as Sixth Avenue's resident philosopher, mentor and informal community leader -- Duneier gradually got to know most of the street's other vendors. In addition to booksellers like Hasan, whose trade is generally aboveboard, there are magazine vendors like Marvin and Ron, a team who go through recycling bins searching out recent issues of desirable titles to sell (although the selling is legal, the scavenging technically is not). There are men who sometimes panhandle and sometimes "lay shit out" -- spread miscellaneous salvaged or stolen merchandise on the ground (which is not legal). There are table watchers (who fill in when a vendor needs to leave his table), placeholders (who stay on the street all night to ensure a vendor won't lose his spot), movers (who transport books and magazines to and from a vendor's spot) and storage providers (who can store merchandise overnight in basements or subway tunnels).
Although his sympathy is clearly with the vendors, Duneier does not flinch from recounting their failures along with their successes. He writes fascinating chapters about his observations of such frankly antisocial behavior as public urination and the harassment of female pedestrians. But what he sees in general is a dynamic economy created by a group of virtually destitute men, in which there is strong pressure to conform to societal norms. In his years on the blocks as a "participant observer," Duneier has watched homeless men become housed, addicts seek treatment and criminals turn to lawful work. He argues that any attempts to "improve" the neighborhood by purging the vendors are likely to prove counterproductive, and asks whether some arbitrary ideal of public order is worth depriving our poorest citizens of the right to pursue honest entrepreneurial activity.
Throughout his experience on the blocks (much of it working as a vendor with Marvin and Ron), Duneier remains acutely aware of the racial and social gulf between him and the men he meets. He was perceived at different times, he writes, as "a naпve white man who could himself be exploited...; a Jew who was going to make a lot of money off the stories of people working the streets; a white writer who was trying to 'state the truth about what was going on.'"
Add to that list a noble and compassionate scholar who has made an invaluable contribution to both current social-policy debates and the cause of human understanding. As Hakim Hasan observes in the afterword Duneier asked him to write (after previously bringing Hasan to Santa Barbara to co-teach a seminar), the sociology grad student's "romanticized idea of 'the subject's voice' is one thing. The radical willingness of the social scientist to listen is quite another." Furthermore, this social scientist has displayed a radical willingness to put his money where his mouth is -- Duneier has committed to sharing the profits of Sidewalk with 21 of the people who appear in it.
Publishers Weekly
Investigating the complex social ecology of a three-block span of New York's Greenwich Village (a neighborhood that helped shape pioneering urban critic Jane Jacobs's thinking on the structure of cities), Duneier offers a vibrant portrait of a community in the shadows of public life. A white, middle-class sociologist whose Slim's Table won plaudits for its nuanced portrait of urban black men, Duneier infiltrated a stretch of lower Sixth Avenue frequented by scavengers, panhandlers and vendors of used and discounted books and magazines. As participant-observer, he spent months working the vendors' tables, gaining impressive access and insight. He suggests, contrary to Christopher Jencks in The Homeless, that many choose to sleep on the sidewalk even if they have money for a room. He not only observes but experiences arbitrary displays of authority by the police, who tell him to stop selling books and magazines one Christmas. Duneier adroitly explains how disparate policies--such as pressure on the homeless at Penn Station and a law that exempts vendors of written matter from licensing--have redefined life and business conditions in the city streets. He further argues that, despite the apparent disorder created by the vendors, the sidewalk creates an opportunity for income, respect and social support. In a retort to the influential "broken windows" theory behind community policing, he concludes that policy makers must do better to distinguish between inanimate signs of decline, such as graffiti, and the vendors or panhandlers who strive for better lives. The dozens of photos interspersed throughout--by Chicago Tribune photographer Carter, a previous collaborator with the author--add depth to a book that achieves a remarkably intimate perspective on life on the margins of New York City. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Behind the seeming simplicity of this book's title lies a little-known, complex subculture of urban life. Duneier (Univ. of Wisconsin/Univ. of California; Slim's Table) introduces readers to a number of people who make their home and their living on the sidewalk. He researched this population by living among, talking to, and, most of all, listening to the book and magazine vendors, pedestrians, police officers, business leaders, and politicians whose lives intersect on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village, New York City. Together with Carter, an award-winning photojournalist, Duneier elucidates the people and the functions of sidewalk culture, showing how, in many ways, it improves a city's quality of life. In telling the story of Sixth Avenue's "residents," the author hopes to enlighten citizenry and city leaders alike and inspire greaterrespect for this culture. A wonderful success; highly recommended for college-educated readers and larger public libraries.--Deborah Bigelow, Leonia P.L., Little Falls, NJ Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Entertainment Weekly
An eloquent, unromanticized portrait of how race, class and homelessness play out in a public place.
Luc Sante
A necessary book … A work of frontline reportage, an inquiry into the economic and political and moral forces that are busy reconfiguring the city at this moment, and an urgent plea for justice.
— Voice Literary Supplement
Richard Eder
A magnificent book … A vivid, patient and moving account of those who have inched up from crime and despair to take control, however precarious and scruffy, of their lives. From behind the broken windows, human eyes peer out.
— New York Times
Kirkus Reviews
Sociologist Duneier (Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison; Slim's Table: Respectability and Masculinity, 1994) constructs a nuanced study of the lives of impoverished street vendors in New York's Greenwich Village. Any day along Sixth Avenue in the Village, rows of tables congest the sidewalk, piled with reading material for sale—from new books to old magazines retrieved from Dumpsters. The sellers are mostly black men; many are homeless, drug addicts, alcoholics. They often engage in "deviant" behavior, such as public urination and engaging unwilling passersby in conversation. Some in the neighborhood accept them as part of the scene, more view them as a threat to the quality of life of the area and a magnet for crime. As a "participant observer" for a number of years, Duneier has tried to understand the motivation and meaning of the actions of these street vendors. They are not an aimless gathering of down-and-outers, but a complex world of norms and self-regulation, of variegated attitudes and self-images. Most view their work—even if it's only panhandling and not selling—as honorable in that they are in fact working, not stealing or robbing. Still they rankle and are often the object of police harassment and government sanctions. Why this is so involves an intricate pas de deux between the street people and residents. Because, for example, they assume with good reason they will not be allowed to use public facilities, the street people urinate in the street. Because the street people urinate in the street, local merchants assume they are not the type of people to be allowed into their establishments. And on and on. Underlying all of this, Duneier argues carefully,is the fear of black men in social spaces. His aim is to have us really begin to see such men. In this, he is ably assisted by the numerous photographs by Pulitzer-winner Ovie Carter illustrating the people, places, and predicaments of which Duneier writes. A work that adds much to our understanding of race, poverty, and our reactions to them.
What People Are Saying
Spike Lee
Mitchell Duneier has opened [the sidewalk] world up to me … in a way that only a work of the greatest integrity could. He writes to inform rather than to impress. The result is the most readable work of sociology that I have ever come across.
Table of Contents:
| Introduction | 3 |
| PART ONE THE INFORMAL LIFE OF THE SIDEWALK | |
| The Book Vendor | 17 |
| The Magazine Vendors | 43 |
| The Men without Accounts | 81 |
| PART TWO NEW USES OF SIDEWALKS | |
| How Sixth Avenue Became a Sustaining Habitat | 115 |
| PART THREE THE LIMITS OF INFORMAL SOCIAL CONTROL | |
| Sidewalk Sleeping | 157 |
| When You Gotta Go | 173 |
| Talking to Women | 188 |
| Accusations: Caveat Vendor? | 217 |
| PART FOUR REGULATING THE PEOPLE WHO WORK THE STREETS | |
| The Space Wars: Competing Legalities | 231 |
| A Christmas on Sixth Avenue | 253 |
| PART FIVE THE CONSTRUCTION OF DECENCY | |
| A Scene from Jane Street | 293 |
| Conclusion | 312 |
| Afterword by Hakim Hasan | 319 |
| Appendix: A Statement on Method | 333 |
| Notes | 359 |
| Acknowledgments | 381 |
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