Bedrosian Bookclub Podcast

In part 2 of our discussion of Cop in the Hood by Peter Moskos, we discuss the notion of discretion in the legal system - by police all the way to prosecutors & parole/probation boards. We think about discrimination in enforcement made possible by discretion. We think about conflicts of interest in investigations of police misconduct. How should we move forward?

We ask how to define "good" policing, as we discuss sociologist Peter Moskos' Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District. What expectations do we put on police officers? How do police departments measure success? What should we measure for success? What does "law and order" mean? Do police receive the right kind of training to deliver the service communities want them to provide? How does Baltimore differ from Los Angeles? We also discuss the epic policy failure of the War on Drugs and the idea of legalization.

In Colson Whitehead's award-winning novel The Underground Railroad, Cora, daughter and granddaughter of slaves, flees her plantation after a horrific punishment. She heads out with a fellow slave Caesar, who takes her to the underground railroad – in this novel, a real RR. She is passionately pursued by Ridgeway, a slave catcher while she experiences the horrors of American racism and the courage of the RR personnel. The book compares a mythological Southern narrative of slavery with Cora's truths and Ridgeway's version of the "American imperative." Beautifully written, full of horrific incidents, the book reminds us of the power of racism, the government's complicity in its implementation and persistence, and reminds us freed African Americans carried with them the legacy of violence, oppression, suppression, and more violence whether from the police, physicians, or any other institution.

Hillbilly Elegy is a memoir by J. D. Vance about family; about Appalachia, hillbillies, and the American white underclass in the rural and semi-rural interior of the United States. Vance relates his traumatic, poverty stricken upbringing to the larger social problems in both his hometown and the larger population. He ties the growing opioid epidemic sweeping the country to the growing divide between Red and Blue. With frankness, he describes addiction in his family, the larger trauma of communities losing jobs, and finally the interventions that helped him rise out of poverty to attend OSU and Yale Law. Through his personal struggles, he raises questions of personal responsibility and role of government in communities.

American Gods is the story of America as a quilted patchwork of immigrant cultures with a diverse and every-growing number of beliefs. The story begins with Shadow, released from jail several days early because his wife is killed in a car accident. He encounters the mysterious Mr. Wednesday almost immediately upon release – once, twice, and again and is offered a job. He discovers that Mr. Wednesday is Odin, the Lord of Asgard, symbol of the forgotten gods living throughout America. With jobs ranging from prostitute to taxi driver, these "old" gods make do while they hope that Americans will remember, and honor them. Their holy places are the roadside attractions so dismissed by modern Americans. Their hope to be remembered is apparently in conflict with a new set of gods; Media, Town, Credit Cards, and others whose temples are our shopping malls. Shadow has a series of adventures, some in real life, some in dreams, as he journeys from someone not quite alive to the key individual in the upcoming battle for supremacy between the old and new gods.

The novel is a fascinating exploration of the meaning of ethnicity, modernism, memory, and community in which we are reminded of the many ethnicities that make up America, but also their amalgamation into a secular American society with few gods. As multiple characters remind us, America is a hard place to be a god. This is a quintessential American novel from a quintessential British storyteller – it's a sprawling road trip into the vast highways and byways of the American landscape, it's a horror novel, a mystery, a romance, a western, a fantasy, and ultimately a look into the heart of America.

Featuring Caroline Bhalla, Raphael Bostic, Lisa Schweitzer, and David Sloane

In White Trash: The 400-year Untold History of Class in America, historian Nancy Isenberg traces white poverty and class from the earliest British settlements through to the 21st century. What she finds is that the mythology of social mobility and classlessness of American Exceptionalism is just that, a myth. By taking a deep dive into a sub-class of Americans, Isenberg hopes that Americans can face a truth about the enduring poverty on inequality that has shaped the American consciousness. That not only do we have classes, but these classes have been built by policies going back to the very reason British citizens came to the colonies. Our discussion of the book looks at where this history contributes to our current political conversation and where it could have been more focused to tell the story in a more cohesive way.

The City and The City by China Miéville is a noir detective murder mystery set in an urban fantasy landscape where the cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma are not just neighboring, but enmeshed in overlapping space. What begins as a question of whether the young woman's murderer transferred the body between the cities illegally (Breach) becomes a question of how deep the conspiracy behind her murder goes. Though the plot seems a usual murder mystery, the author takes us on the journey to discover how people learn to live in cities, how cities become entities, and how politics can be dictated through everyday actions learned from an early age. We discuss the many fascinating intricacies of this novel to look at how we walk in our communities. (Spoilers!)

Spoilers in this book club podcast! If you want to read before you listen ... read and come back soon!

Junot Díaz made his debut with Drown (https://goo.gl/3HXB4p), ten interconnected short stories in 1997, our book club pic for November 2016. These coming-of-age stories grant the reader a brief glimpse into the lives of immigrants, their lives in poverty in the Dominican Republic through migration to life on the edges in New Jersey. "Diaz evokes a world in which fathers are gone, mothers fight with grim determination for their families and themselves, and the next generation inherits the casual cruelty, devastating ambivalence, and knowing humor of lives circumscribed by poverty and uncertainty." (Goodreads - https://goo.gl/3HXB4p) Throughout the stories the resilience of the characters, the humanness in squalor points to universal truths, unique beauty, and casual violence in our own lives and the lives of those around us.

Featuring Caroline Bhalla, Raphael Bostic, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, and Richard Green

This episode features a discussion of David Ulin's Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles. A transplant to Los Angeles from New York, Ulin's long essay/memoir is a meditation on moving through and defining his relationship with the sprawling diversity that is the City of Angels. The book begins with an essay on how walking can be a way to discover the city (any city or town) through serendipity. Ulin describes the discovery of an interesting church by turning a different way on a usual route. Through this personal journey of exploration, Ulin "comes to terms" with Los Angeles. While marketed as a book about walking in the city where no one walks, our readers found this book to be an exploration of how one makes memories, how one interprets those memories through time, and how Ulin makes peace with his adopted home.

Special bonus track! An interview with The Sympathizer author Viet Thanh Nguyen.

On April 18, 2016, The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize in the fiction category. Less than a month later, USC Professor Nguyen's nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies was published. These were written together over the last 13 years or so, are part of Nguyen's exploration of the underlying issues of war and the aftermath of war on those countless affected. The novel while dark, gives voice to the things we hide from ourselves as societies when we try to build a history. The lines between good and evil are not stark but squiggly and porous. The themes in both the novel and the nonfiction that follows it are vital to explore when thinking of public policy & governance in a global world.

We are delighted to present this conversation with scholar Viet Thanh Nguyen, who was gracious enough to spend some time with our Acting Director, Aubrey Hicks.

For links to some of the things we talk about check out the showpage:

This podcast was produced by Aubrey Hicks and Jonathan Schwartz, recorded and mixed by Corey Hedden.