Two new books about public housing in Chicago

Tyrone Galtney's new book about public housing in Chicago is one of one on the subject that I'm raring to read.

I rarely do this, but am so excited about these two books about public housing in Chicago that I am going to give a brief description of them before having read the work.  

Tyrone Galtney’s The “No-Way Out” Syndrome Robert Taylor Homes Coup de tat’ is an insider’s look at life inside the largest and one of the most notorious homes in the Chicago Housing Authority. 

D. Bradford Hunt’s Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing is a scholarly account that challenges traditional interpretations that emphasize racism and poverty and look also at historical federal policies. 

I’ll write more after reading the books, and both promise to reward the reader.

Edgar Stoesz tell us how to be effective board members.

 

 

Veteran board member Edgar Stoesz has written this handbook to help us serve more effectively.

I am a member of Kuumba Lynx’s board of directors.

A name that combines the Swahili word for creativity with the lynx’s mighty roar, the Uptown-based organization works with youth from many backgrounds and throughout Chicago.  ‘KL’ members dance, rap, tag, recite poetry they’ve written and express themselves in a myriad other ways. 

Created by three dynamic young Chicago women in the late 90s who saw the need to provide a safe and creative space for young people, the organization has helped thousands of Chicago youth, and, in some cases, transformed and even saved young people’s lives.

For the past few months, I have been honored to serve on the board of directors of this remarkable organization.

It is the first board to which I have belonged, and, in order to do my work more knowledgeably and effectively, I have read Edgar Stoesz’s Doing Good even Better: How to be an Effective Board Member of a Nonprofit Organization.

The former chair of Habitat for Humanity International who had a nearly 40-year career within the Mennonite community, Stoesz is direct about bringing a religious perspective to his work. 

Those readers who would dismiss Doing Good even Better on that basis deprive themselves of the opportunity to absorb a host of specific and practical tips about how to hold tighter and better run meetings, navigate conflict, participate in thinking about the organization’s long-term health and direction, and help the executive director improve her job performance.

Stoesz makes it clear both that a dedicated, talented and diverse group of people are the foundation for effective boards and that this work should be fun a lot of the time.

He notes that board members must strike a balance between being supportive of the organization’s leaders, communicating with the membership and thinking about the fiduciary responsibilities one assumes when agreeing to serve in this capacity.

Board members should attend as many events as possible, not just to watch the performance, in the case of Kuumba Lynx, but to gather information about how the work is progressing.  In addition, board members should have the courage and clarity of mind to identify specific standards by which directors are evaluated and then hold them to those standards.

The section on meetings was particularly useful.

Stoesz had a number of suggestions that seemed like they would save time and ensure that the group spends as much time as possible on the most important elements.  To begin, he said agenda formation of the following meeting should begin as soon as the previous one ends.  That way, the board chair and the executive director can talk when the ideas and thoughts and energy are all fresh.

Stoesz also advocates for groups to start on time, to take no more than two hours to meet, and to consider abandoning the traditional rhythm of approving the minutes, old business, new business, set the next meeting time agenda in favor of accomplishing what can be done online between meetings so that as much of the in-person time as possible is spent on discussing critical issues.

Another positive aspect of the work is the numerous examples he supplies throughout the book as well as the series of appendices, that include elements like a sample evaluation for an executive director and tool for the board’s own self-assessment.

Stoesz also acknowledges that at times conflict does occur within groups. 

He discusses the various negotiating styles-from intimdiation to accommodation to compromise to collaboration-that people bring to these conversations.   While the identification of these approaches is neither original nor unique to the book, it is a helpful reminder of the role group dynamics and communication plays in the advancement or floundering of any organization’s work and mission.

Stoesz also talked about the importance of policies, applied in moderation so that they don’t become restrictive, in helping to shift work and interactions from an individual to a more systematic basis. Like all of his or anyone else’s points, his ideas need to be applied in the context of the particular organization with which one is working, and this one I thought was also well made and one that we would be well advised to consider.

A final element of the book was Stoesz’s emphasis on helping the organization and its leaders think about their future direction, and, if necessary, to help re-envision or reinvigorate people or whole groups that have either become stuck in their ways or have insufficient time to think or dream big.

Clearly written and accessible to a wide range of readers, then, Doing Good even Better has a host of useful information that helped me think about my new responsibiliites.  While some sections were stronger than others, I do recommend those who are considering or already serving on boards to read this book as a tool to help us think about the duty we have chosen, or are about, to assume.

Running Ricky Byrdsong race as a family and reading his book about parenting and coaching.

 

The late Ricky Byrdsong's book about parenting was just one of the many treats at today's memorial race in his honor.

 

 

I’m back home, showered and rested after our family took part in the 10th annual Ricky Byrdsong Memorial Race Against Hate.

The race was started in 1999 after the much loved former Northwestern men’s basketball coach was slain near his home in Skokie by a white supremacist. 

As always, Byrdsong’s widow Sherialyn was on hand to tell us to take our marks and go. 

Dunreith walked with our friend Maureen Ruder, while Aidan, despite his pre-race prediction of not being able to break 25 minutes, knocked at least six minutes off his record time and nearly caught Sunday night hoops assassin Judson Brooks at the finish line. 

I finished at just about 20 minutes, meeting my goal for the race and leaving me hungry to do more such runs so that I can improve my time and continue my now 10-year quest to break my personal record of 18:48. 

I know I’ve got a ways to go.

Sponsored by many local organizations, and replete with goodies ranging from a grab bag, sporty blue t-shirts, all kinds of food and drink, free massages, a yoga class for children, water bottles, and free live entertainment, the event was was both well-organized and filled with good will.

One of my favorite items among the many we received was Byrdsong’s book, Coaching Your Kids in the Game of Life.  Written with Evanston authors Dave and Neta Jackson, the book was completed after Byrdsong’s murder and published in 2000.  

Byrdsong explains that he took up the project because so many parents told him that their children were failing in life. 

His solution: to draw on a combination of scripture, other coaches’ words and actions, and his own experiences-these include everything from his youth in Atlanta, coaching in various capacities during an 18-year career, his marriage to high school sweetheart Sherialyn, and the raising of their three children-to create this accessible and practical book designed to help the parents whose children are struggling. 

Coaching Your Kids is broken into a dozen chapters, each of which takes a seemingly sports-related theme-Rebounding Makes MVPs and Home Court Advantage are just-and connects it to parenting issues.  Byrdsong also includes “Free Throws,” or reviews, at the end of each chapter that give readers opportunities for self-reflection, assessment and possible change. 

His fundamental message is to instill character and belief in one’s children and players through a blend of spiritual, moral and emotional fitness. Byrdsong recommends that families create a mission statement as an effort to define what they are about and to guide individual actions; the book includes mission statements for his children and his Northwestern team.  He talks about the importance of respectful relationships in which children and their friends are known, loved, supported and disciplined.  And, in a chapter called Playin’ on Through, he writes about how to adjust to life’s inevitable setbacks, using his own firing from Northwestern as an example.  

Byrdsong also makes the point that the need for parents does not decrease during a child’s teenage years, even as one is learning how to let the child take more and more responsibility for his choices and life’s direction. 

Byrdsong makes some questionable choices about who to hold up as models-the abusive Bob Knight appears repeatedly, for example-and he endorses spanking, which is a practice to which neither Dunreith and I ever subscribed.  The content he presents is neither ground breaking nor earth shattering.  Still, one cannot finish reading this practical and helpful book about one of life’s greatest challenges without having a dual sense of sadness that he was killed while he still had so much left to give and appreciative for all that he did while alive and what he left behind.

That sense is only heightened when one reads Sherialyn’s afterword, in which she returns again and again to the word “After” to talk about his final weeks, in which he learned that the book had found a home, and hours after he was shot, in which she stayed in the critical care room, urging him without success to stay alive. 

Sherialyn explains that four months after her husband’s death, “I’m still trying to find the words to say after all these things.” 

Somehow, she did.  

But she didn’t stop there.  

She created a foundation and she helped create the race that Dunreith, Aidan and I ran today, along with thousands of other people. 

For her courage, for her husband’s life and many gifts, one of which is Coaching Your Kids, we are grateful.

Weekend recommendations: Jabari Asim takes on The N Word while Rosabeth Moss Kanter writes about confidence.

 

Dave Chappelle's turn as blind KKK member Clayton Bigsby is just one of the many topics addressed in Jabari Asim's book. For her part, Rosabeth Moss Kanter writes about organizational confidence in Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End.

 

 

We’re deep into Saturday afternoon, Dunreith and Aidan are shopping, I have just finished cleaning the first floor,  and it’s time to get my blog on!

Today I’m writing a quick post about a couple of books I read this week and enjoyed.

The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t and Why by Jabari Asim looks at the history and cultural significance of those six letters through the arrival of the first Africans in the early 17th century to contemporary comedians, writers and filmmakers.  The editor of The Crisis, the NAACP publication that W.E.B. DuBois edited for decades, Asim is also a scholar at the University of Illinois’ Urbana-Champaign campus.  He divides the work into historical periods that take the reader through American history, with breaks at key moments like the Civil War or the period after the Earl Warren-led U.S. Supreme Court delivered the unanimous Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 that overturned legal segregation.  

Readers of American history will recognize luminaries like the late George Frederickson and Leon Litwack.  Asim also has an engaging take of Mark Twain’s classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and seems most comfortable and fluid when he is writing about the current moment and performers like the provocative Dave Chappelle.  

As the sub-title suggests, Asim also addresses the issue of the word ‘nigga,’ which some people use and claim is not offensive for a number of reasons. He ends the book suggesting that either five- or six-letter version of the word be retired from common use.  The N Word is a wide ranging read on an often controversial subject.

Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter has written a very different, but also engaging book that has potential application for anyone involved in a sports team, organization or country.  Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End is chock full of details and examples from each of those arenas.   At different points in the book, readers get treated to discussion of the New England Patriots, the BBC, and post-apartheid South Africa under Nelson Mandela.  Her main point is that confidence does impact performance and arises from a series of practices that she documents.  By looking at leaders like University of Connecticut women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma, among others, Moss Kanter show the combination of high expectations clearly articulated, a sense of cohesion, and staying calm under pressure that lead to the building and sustaining of confidence.  She also provides examples of how losing streaks happen and extend, and explores how cultures of losing can be turned around and become confident ones. 

A lot of this material may seem like common sense, and Moss Kanter deserves credit for how she pulls the strands together in an entertaining and informative read.

Book thoughts triggered by Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett’s deaths

Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett's deaths have sparked emotional reactions around the globe.

The world is abuzz with reaction to Michael Jackson’s sudden and Farrah Fawcett’s more expected deaths yesterday.

I would only add to the outpouring that both of them brought back many cherished childhood and high school memories. 

I vividly remember the classic  poster of Farrah in a one-piece  red bathing suit that stood proudly in my friend Jimmy Aber’s room.  Her Noxzema commercials  and stint as one of the original Charlie’s Angels were the stuff that inspired a thousand adolescent fantasies, at least.

Learning about Michael Jackson’s death brings back memories of my brother Mike playing Off The Wall six times in a row on our family’s record player, of dancing at nearly every wedding and college dance to I’ll Be There, Rockin’ Robin and ABC, and, of course, Thriller, which dominated the charts throughout the entire senior year of high school and beyond.

They also made me think about a number of books.

Here are three that I like and recommend:

1.On Death and Dying, by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross.  In this book, the Swiss psychiatrist draws on her clinical experience to articulate five stages of death and dying.  Journalist Ron Rosenbaum challenged the paradigm, but its influence remains strong.   I thought of it in light of Fawcett’s ongoing bout with cancer.

2.Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, byPeter Guralnick.  The second of this two-volume biography of a previous “King” details his physical descent and makes the point that, by the end of his life, his circle was just waiting for him to die. A similar set of stories seem to be emerging around Jackson, who, like Presley, rose from humble to roots to become an iconic and grounbreaking figure before descending into become a lurid and tawdry shell of himself.

3. Black Dog of Fate, by Peter Balakian.  Poet Balakian’s paean to his the music and times of his childhood during the 50s connects to the memories of that stage of life.

Kari Lydersen on the Republic Windows and Doors Strike.

 

Kari Lydersen's new book helps us understand the Republic Windows and Doors strike and its larger meaning.

The Republic Windows and Doors strike captured the attention and imagination of people around the world. 

Coming after Barack Obama’s election and just before former Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s federal indictment on corruption charges, the factory takeover by about 250 workers came at a time when the economic downturn was just starting to gather steam and when public revulsion at bank CEOs’ more than generous share of government largesse was hitting its peak. 

In short, the timing was auspicious for the wider public to be sympathetic to workers refusing to be shown the door on essentially no notice. 

The ultimate meaning of the event is less clear, and will be borne out in the months and years to come. 

Washington Post reporter, prolific freelancer and friend Kari Lydersen was there from the strike’s inception to its resolution and subsequent company bankruptcy proceedings and workers’ tour. 

Her coverage of the events through a “live book” -this was essentially two months of extensive blogging-has led to the publication this month by Melville House Publishing of Revolt on Goose Island: The Chicago Factory Takeover, and What It Says About the Economic Crisis.  

This is Lydersen’s third book, and each has been different from the other.  Out of the Sea and Into the Fire was a collection of dispatches that looked at the intersection of environmental, immigration and social justice issues in the United States as well as Central and South America.   Shoot an Iraqi, which she co-authored with Wafaa Bilal, covered the month long experience of the artist Bilal as he did a performance installation that fused technology, art and memory.  

Revolt on Goose Island is a more straightforward expository account of the strike, its multi-level background, the action itself, and subsequent reverberations.  Impressive not only for the sheer fact of having been reported, written, edited and published just about half a year after the strike transpired, the work provides useful context and is a helpful tool to put the strike in a broader understanding of the current moment. 

Lydersen’s pro-worker sympathies-her final acknowledgment goes to “Chicago’s countless labor and immigrant rights activists who have taught us so much and continued the city’s proud history of struggle”-do not stop her from either from trying to contact management or from explaining the immediate and longer-term build up to the strike.  

In turn, she looks at the history of Goose Island itself, Chicago’s history of labor action, the role of immigrants in the current labor movement, the company’s moves to liquidate its holdings on Goose Island, the bank’s history and role in the bailout and the workers’ decision to do something about it.  

Lydersen notes the open discussion about whether the strike was a spontaneous product of workers’ being frustrated with this final indignity-an analysis that is similar to the “Rosa Parks was tired” way of thinking-or whether it was the result of careful planning, and chronicles both the same type of actions Republic owners took with other companies it bought and the ripple effect the strike had on workers in the Colibri Group in Rhode Island when faced with similar circumstances.

In short, Revolt on Goose Island is a highly useful primer on what some say could be the spark to revive a moribund labor movement that has been on its heels for nearly three decades or just a blip on the global capitalist scene.  To her credit, Lydersen does mark the distinction between the Republic workers’ action and the automotive workers’ sit-down strikes more than 70 years ago.  The former was fighting essentially for a severance package guaranteed by law, while the latter was striking for a reasonable wage and benefits package. 

Revolt on Goose Island is not without some minor flaws.  

Some of the statements Lydersen makes do not seem supported by the fact; she says Cleveland has a “relatively healthy rate of unionization” when it is not even 2 percent above the national norm 12.4 percent, for example.   Although generally cleanly written and containing lots of physical description, the book at times contains too many colloquial expressions and the insertion of detail feels a bit deliberate.  

On the whole, though, these problems are far less significant than the thoughtful and detailed book Lydersen has generated in remarkably short time.  While the ultimate meaning of the strike on Goose Island has yet to be determined, Lydersen has already provided useful with a work that both documents the events and gives us a helpful tool for that assessment process.

Weekend Update

We spent a wonderfully relaxing weekend in Rockport, eating lobster,    hanging out and reading.  Image courtesy of Michelle* (xena2542)’s photostream, Creative Commons

I’m back after a terrific Father’s Day weekend with Dunreith and Aidan in Rockport. 

We played frisbee on the beach, took numerous trips to Tuck’s, a magical candy with all kinds of hip-widening morsels, indulged in lobster on both Friday and Saturday nights, and walked along the seashore and to the local quarry. 

We also read.

Here are quick summaries of the books I got through this weekend:

Ruth Behar’s The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart.  Yet another gift by friend and reader Evan Kaplan, this collection of essays by MacArthur Award-winning anthropologist Behar are intensely and deliberately personal in nature.  In the title essay, Behar pushes hard and convincingly against the idea of scholarly objectivity, arguing instead for people’s willingness to insert themselves into their work, and to do so in vulnerable ways.

Other essays explore her decision whether or not to return to her native Cuba, her time studying death rituals in rural Spain rather than returning home to be with her dying Jewish grandfather, her relationship with Marta, a Mexican woman who cleans her house, the impact of a childhood car accident, and a forceful response to two academics who are critical of the work of Renato Rosaldo. 

Behar’s point about doing work that matters is well taken, she writes well, and her essays are engaging beyond the richness of her personal background.

Excerpts from everyone from Kay Redfield Jamison to Henry Louis Gates to Clifford Geertz to Alice Miller appear in this provocative and worthwhile, if occasionally too self-referential, collection.

David Piper’s I Am Well, Who Are You.  Mr. Piper was father of my best friend Tom in England when Dad had a sabbatical and we lived in Oxford during the 1978-1979 school year.   I did know that he was the head of Oxford’s venerable Ashmolean Museum and later was knighted for his scholarly contributions.

I did not know that he had been a Japanese prisoner of war for more than three years during World War II. 

This book tells his story.

I am well has two parts: a reflective essay looking back at his wartime experiences at a distance of 20 years, and excerpts from his prison diaries.

Both are powerful and haunting in their own way.  Piper’s detached way of looking at himself and understated writing style only bring out the horror of his experience in even starker relief.  By the war’s end, the 6’1″ Piper weighed barely more than 100 pounds: the fact of his survival, and the gratitude that accompanied it, never left him.

Published after his death by his widow Lady Anne Piper, who I primarily knew as Tom’s mother, the book includes a time line, stark back and front cover images designed by Tom, who has gone on to become a very prominent stage designer for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and a list of relatives and descendants.

Some of the most poignant parts of the book come at the moments of tenderness that Piper describes, whether listening to birds, hearing music by some of his beloved composers, or thinking of Anne, his intended who he met before he enlisted and whose image sustained him during all his deprivation.

These moments of affirmation are just one part of what this make this slender book a memorable and meaningful read.

Lucette Lagnado’s The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World is a rich and full evocation of the little known (to me) world of Jewish Cairo.  A Wall Street Journal reporter, Lagnado describes in vivid and sensual detail the vibrant culture that thrived before the post-World War II ascension of Gamal Adbel Nasser and the accompanying exodus of much of Egyptian Jewry.

Her father Leon is the book’s protagonist. 

A dashing figure who reminds some people of Cary Grant, a self-made businessman who taught himself seven language, and a legendary womanizer, he appears headed for a lifetime of bachelorhood before meeting Lucette’s mother Edith.

A very brief courtship ensues in the book’s opening scene.

What follows is a tale that moves back to Aleppo and an exploration of Syrian Jewry, down into the activity that swirled around the neighborhood and Malaka Nazli, the family homestead, and forward in time to Lucette’s birth, the father’s debilitating accident, and the Lagnado’s departure first to France and then the United States.

There is plenty of heartache throughout the book. 

Lucette’s mother Edith has a brother who is sold by her father because he says the family cannot afford to feed another mouth.

Lucette’s older sister Alexandra dies after just eight days.

Her father, a romantic if philandering presence, is diminished after the moves and never regains either full mobility or his sense of mastery of his environment in either of the two countries to which he moves.

Her mother is cowed and unable either to cut ties with her unfaithful husband or, in the United States, to break through absorbed gender limitations and take a job that could have gotten her out of the home and propelled the family to middle-class status.

And so on.

Still, as in both of the other books, Lagnado’s work has moments of deep connection, some of which are spent in silence.

The book also has useful supplemental materials, including the article she wrote for Father’s Day in 2004 about her father’s repayment of the debt he accrued while moving from France to the United States, a reflection about reader responses and a list of books that influenced her during her writing.

At times, Lagnado’s training manifests itself in single-sentence paragraphs whose brevity are intended to heighten the dramatic effect, but which at times interrupt the reading rhythm.  This is a minor blemish, though, on a memorable and compelling work.

James Carroll’s American Requiem

 

James Carroll's National Book Award winner is a fitting choice for Father's Day.

It’s Father’s Day today, so happy day to all of the fathers in the collective house.

In honor of the day, and of my dad, today’s book is James Carroll’s An American Requiem: God, My Father and the War That Came Between Us.

A former priest, prolific, elegant and scholarly writer and fervent pacifist, Carroll is one of Dad’s heroes.  He has written a column for many years for The Boston Globe and authored, among many other books, Constantine’s Sword, the magisterial work about the Catholic Church and the rise of antisemitism. 

An American Requiem is a remarkably personal work that opens with one of the most memorable scenes I have ever read.  A newly anointed priest, Carroll is redeeming his father, who was a “spoiled priest”-one who entered, but left the seminary.  Yet, with his parent in attendance and kneeling near the pulpit, Carroll uses the occasion of his first sermon to speak out against the Vietnam War, of which his father was an architect and which was carried out by the military in which his father was one of the Pentagon’s only civilian generals. 

His father is weeping. 

From this opening scene, Carroll takes us back into his childhood, part of which was spent in Western Germany, into the family history that shaped him and into the war that divided the Carrolls as it did so many other families.  One of Carroll’s was a draft resister, while another worked to catch draft resisters. 

In the end, though, the book is also about Carroll’s striving to know and feel deeply connected to his reserved and somewhat emotionally repressed father.  

I will not reveal the ending, but will say that the reader who gets there will feel rewarded and haunted by this searingly honest and elegantly written book.

The Namies tell us how to beat the bully at work.

 

Gary and Ruth Namie explain the widespread practice of bullying at the workplace and say what targets can do to stop it.

 

 

Quick post today as Aidan and I are slated to head to Massachusetts to join Dunreith and celebrate Father’s Day with my dad. 

I’ve been on a work-related reading jag, and want to recommend Gary and Ruth Namie’s The Bully at Work: What You Can Do to Stop the Hurt and Reclaim Your Dignity On The Job. 

This accessible, practical and bracingly honest book explains just how widespread bullying at the work place, punctures myths about bullying, breaks down how bullies choose their target and goes through a host of strategies, including taking legal action, that workers have at their disposal to counter bullying. 

Often time consuming, slow and expensive, the legal approach is a final resort that holds no guarantee of financial reward, but is still one that some should consider nonetheless, the Namies say.

Fortunately, the situation can often be addressed before such drastic measures become necessary.  The Namies are clear, though, that no amount of appeasing will change the bully’s behavior and equally direct about the point that more than 80 percent of bullies are bosses.  Their identification of the reasons why bullies choose their targets, and, from there, what can be done to confront and even topple the bully are useful, too.

Stunning series in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer about a woman’s healing from being raped.

Joanna Connors talks with a female relative of the man who raped her.

I know I almost always write about books, and today’s post is about a remarkable Cleveland Plain-Dealer series by Joanna Connors. 

Then a theater writer, Connors was raped in 1984 by Dave English while she was on the way to a play. 

She has felt the reverberations since. 

There is much to commend in the series.  The writing is painfully honest, direct and artful.  Connors not only describes the rape in graphic detail, she talks openly about issues of race-she is white, while English was black-and how the rape pointed her in directions and stereotypes she had sought her whole life to counter.

The structure commands attention, too.

In the first entry, Connors moves back and forth in time, building to the rape the reader knows is coming, filling the reader with a sense of impending dread.  Yet the doom is postponed by her moves forward to her life in the present, showing how the event lives on and permeates all aspects of her life: her writing; her parenting; her friends; and her eventually shattered marriage.

Her journey toward healing is neither straight nor fast, but one that she does eventually gather the courage to pursue.  In an ironic twist, she learns that the rapist she decides she needed to see had died several years before in prison.

Connors seeks out English’s family members in Massachusetts,  a number of whom were themselves raped.  She musters the strength to tell them why she has come to meet them and what their brother did to her. 

And, somehow, she finds within herself the compassion to learn about the abusive environment in which English was raised, and, ultimately, to see herself as having had more choice in certain ways than English did due to the abuse he sustained as a child.

It’s a harrowing and powerful journey, accompanied and enriched by photographs and other multi-media content. 

We are the richer for Connors’ having shared it with us.