Mitch Albom learns to have a little faith.

You remember Mitch Albom.

The guy from Tuesdays with Morrie? The Detroit sportswriter who had lost his way in Detroit and in life in general and needed participating in his favorite professor’s struggle with ALS to get him back to what was important in life?

After the phenomenal success of Morrie, which lead to the posthumous publication of a book by Schwartz, Albom has had a television show and written several successful novels.

For my birthday, my mom got me Have a Little Faith, Albom’s most recent foray into non-fiction.

I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised and moved.

The book essentially tells three stories during an eight-year period.  The first is of Albert Lewis, Albom’s childhood rabbi who asks him to write his eulogy when that time comes. Albom agrees on the condition that he get to know Lewis.   The second is the story of Henry Covingtion, a Christian preacher in Detroit who took a long and very hard road to the pulpit.  The third, of course, if Albom’s recounting of his own experience with, and journey toward, an authentic, rather than received, faith.

Albom is a sportswriter to his core and Have a Little Faith bears that imprint.  The book’s short chapters move briskly along as he alternates getting to know Lewis and his gradual acceptance, and later embrace, of Covington.  He also intersperses excerpts from Lewis’ sermons over the years.

There are major differences between the two men.

Covington is a former addict, drug dealer and felon who spent years in prison for a murder charge he says he did not commit.  Lewis, while failing once to gain admission to the rabbinical academy, had no brushes with the law.  Lewis is relatively fit, while Covington is enormously overweight.  Covington is black, while Lewis is white.  And Lewis’ congregation has close to 1,000 families and sufficient money while Covington’s flock is tiny by comparison and is in a building with a large hole in the roof.

That said, Albom does show similarities between the two men.

Both men toil tirelessly for their G-d and are much loved by their congregants.  Both have one wife and the same number of children.  And both in some way touch Albom and force him to confront his own skepticism toward organized religion and spiritual belief.

Have a Little Faith is filled with poignant details about Lewis’ courage in the face of his gradual but inevitable physical decline and of Covington’s relentless search for redemption for the nefarious acts he committed earlier in his life.   To his credit, Albom does show both his initial hesitation toward Covington because of his past and his movement toward a different attitude-a move that is propelled by hearing one of Covington’s churchgoers explain the man’s impact on his life.

By the end, the sermon for which Lewis asked is largely an afterthought.  Albom deserves credit for this latest in his many stories and books that remind us of where life’s meaning resides through his relationships with these two leaders who had very different life histories but arrived at much the same place by the book’s end.

Jeff Haas revisits the murder of Fred Hampton

December will mark 40 years since Fred Hampton was murdered in bed with his pregnant fiancee.

Jeff Haas, co-founder of the People’s Law Office, spent the following dozen years waging a battle to bring his killers to justice and to expose the collaboration between the Chicago Police Department and the FBI through its notorious COINTELPRO program.

Haas shares his memories of, and reflections on, that at times seemingly interminable journey in The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther.

Many thanks to friend Craig Segal for informing me about the book and to Jen Wisnowski of the Independent Publishers Group for getting it to me.

Haas intersperses his personal experience with his professional efforts to hold Hampton’s killers accountable.  Born to a Jewish family in the South, he is raised with a sense of morality and a desire to do right in the world-qualities that he attributes in large part to his mother.

There were plenty of wrongs to right in the 1960s, which is when Haas came of age. 

He effectively describes the radical and increasingly polarized temper of the time.  At times appears to be reflecting on his enduring ambivalence about his theoretical belief in the necessity of violence to achieve needed social change and his unwillingness to commit such actions himself.  He notes that Weathermen members like Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers similarly came from wealthy backgrounds and did take such action-at one point, leading the death of Ayers’ girlfriend at the time.

A related tension between whether one can legitimately live a middle class lifestyle and still have robust relationship with radical also ends up contributing to the demise of Haas’ first marriage.

This personal is prelude and deeply connected to Haas’ political beliefs.  He is deeply disturbed by the death of the charismatic Hampton, who was coming to prominence at a time when the national Black Panther movement was starting to wane.

Haas demonstrates convincingly throughout the book’s five sections that Hampton was assassinated in cold blood by the Chicago police and the FBI, that both parties attempted a poorly executed cover-up and that Judge Sam Perry was fervently against the efforts by Haas and his colleague Flint Taylor to expose the true nature of what happened.

Haas has a rich array of characters and gripping material to work with, and makes a lot of the opportunity.  He is not an overly impressive stylist and his ability to recall in precise detail conversations he had more than 30 years ago can raise an eyebrow or two, but the book moves quickly along and with increasing pace as he gets deeper and deeper into the legal proceedings.

Vindication of a sort arrives at the end of the legal odyssey.  Fortunately, Haas’ and Hampton’s mother lived long enough both to see the verdict when it finally came and to live today.

Haas will be reading from the book and participating in a high-powered panel at Northwestern University’s Thorne Hall next Thursday night. 

Panelists include Prexy Nesbitt, Martha Biondi, Salim Muwakkil and fellow Kuumba Lynx Board Member David Stovall, among others. Dohrn will moderate. 

At a time when some in Chicago are congratulating themselves for the city’s having contributed heavily to the election of the nation’s first black president, it is useful to read this account of a darker and bloodier time by a man who was there and who sought redress for one of the era’s heinous crimes.

Michael Patrick MacDonald comes to Chicago for iBAM!

Friend and award-winning author Michael Patrick MacDonald will be among the artists participating in the Irish Book Arts & Music Celebration.

It’s been a decade since Beacon Press first published MacDonald’s searing memoir, All Souls: A Family Story from Southie, and he’s gone around to Boston schools recently talking about his and their experience.

The longest paper he had written before that was a 20-page paper for a class at UMass-Boston.

MacDonald tells the story of growing up in busing-era South Boston, where a generation of young people were lost to drugs, murder and other mayhem, all the while declaring that Southie was the best place in the world and that bad things only happened in black neighborhoods.

His family suffered greatly. 

One older brother was murdered by fellow bank robbers.  Another died mysteriously in a jail cell.  A third killed himself by throwing himself from the roof of the Old Colony housing project in which MacDonald and his many siblings lived.

A sister was permanently disabled after being thrown off the roof in an argument over drugs.

Through it all, Helen King, MacDonald’s accordion playing and jogging mother, retains her zest for life.

MacDonald does not shy away from tackling the racism in the community that made international headlines, but also makes it clear that he has little sympathy for the liberal policy makers who pitted two poor and under resourced communities against each other.

The book begins and ends with MacDonald at a vigil for his brothers.  By the end, through his journey, he is able to say his brothers’ names. 

If All Souls is the story of his growing up, Easter Rising, his second book, tells how he got out of Southie.

Music was a key.

Punk music, in fact.

MacDonald shows the importance of physically removing himself from Southie’s dangerous streets and immersing himself in the Kenmore Square punk scene played a critical role in his survival.  His journey in this book takes him to England and to his native Ireland, again with his intrepid mother.

A different and slightly less gritty work than his debut, Easter Rising offers valuable insight into how people in enormously adverse circumstances find a way to survive, and even flourish.

I first met MacDonald in the late 90s after seeing Margaret Lazarus’ film Strong at the Broken Places and an installation at the Charlestown Monument.   I was working for Facing History at the time and got him a number of speaking gigs while he was working on All Souls.

I remember vividly reading the busing chapter he had shared with me while waiting for an appointment at the Rebecca Johnson Middle School.  The image of a pig’s head he described stays with me still.

I told him then that I was glad he had survived, grateful he had shared the work with me, and confident that it would find a very wide audience.

Dunreith and I hope to get together with Mike sometime this weekend.  I highly recommend both of his books.

Aleksandar Hemon speaks at Loyola University tonight, Walter Roth’s book.

 

Aleksandar Hemon can make a lot of other writers want their mommies.

The story of his arrival of the Bosnian native to the United States shortly before war broke out in his homeland is the stuff of legend.

Having a tourist’s version of English when he set foot in America, Hemon set out first to master the language, and then to write for top-flight publications within five years.

He met both goals with a year to spare.

Hemon will be talking tonight at Loyola University’s library about The Lazarus Project, to date his only novel of the four books he has written.

Dunreith and our dear friend, Holocaust survivor, artist, poet and general life inspiration Ava Kadishshon Schieber will be in attendance.

I’ve written before about The Lazarus Project, which intertwines the stories of the early 20th century murder of Lazarus Averbuch by the head of the Chicago Police Department and the quest 100 years later of a Bosnian immigrant writer and his photographer best friend to understand what happened.

While many people may be familiar with Hemon’s work, fewer may know about Walter Roth’s The Accidental Anarchist, a book on which Hemon drew heavily during the writing of the novel.  I had the privilege to meet Roth, whose readable account provides useful background information for Hemon’s work, at a meeting to which Ava invited me of people who had been hidden children during World War II.

At an event last year for his friend Velibor Bozovic, whose black and white pictures run throughout the book, Hemon talked about a trip he and Bozovic took to Eastern Europe before writing the book to understand how the two main characters would experience different moments.

It may sound fantastical, and some may look at the novel’s characters and dispute Hemon’s claims that his protagonists are characters are characters and nothing more.  But in either case, I hope those conversations come after reading his book.  You can’t help but learn from one of this generation’s leading fiction writers; spending time with Roth’s work helps deepen one’s understanding.

DC Trip, Christina Lamb and Kelly Kennedy’s books.

I've read and enjoyed three of Dart Center Ochberg Fellow Christina Lamb's books.

I returned home yesterday from Washington DC, where Kimbriell Kelly, the Rev. Elaine Bellis and I presented about our journalism and community organizing project about nursing homes at the NCCNHR annual conference.

Advocates, lawyers and ombudsmen from all over the country attended, and we got plenty of additional story ideas during a spirited discussed that went beyond the scheduled time.

On Saturday night Rev. Elaine and I went to dinner with childhood buddies M. David Lee III, his brother Teo and friends from last year’s Dart Center Ochberg Fellowship.

Lisa Millar of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation joined us right off the plane from Australia, where she had returned for a week, as did Kelly Kennedy and Christina Lamb, her husband Paulo Anunciacao, and their son Lourenco.

A veteran of both the first Gulf War and Mogadishu, Kelly has just finished They Fought For Each Other, a bookabout a hard hit unit in Iraq that began with a remarkable and award-winning series she did for Military Times.

The book will be out in March next year, and I can’t wait to read it.

Christina, who has reported overseas for more than two decades, has written five books.  I’ve read three of the works, each of which is a testament to her talent and versatility.

The House of Stone covers the history of Zimbabwe, the initial promise of Robert Mugabe’s regime and the bitter betrayal of that hope through the experience of one white and one black family.

The Africa House is a more historical text that draws heavily on letters and journals to tells the story of an eccentric nineteenth century English colonialist who builds a mansion in the African bush, harbors romantic feelings for his aunt and eventually comes to hold somewhat enlightened views toward the local population.

Small Wars Permitting is a collection of dispatches that cover close to 20 years and take the reader from South Africa to Nigeria to England to a pitched battle in Afghanistan. Lamb is at different point wry, whimsical and grateful to be alive.

Nursing Homes Testimony and Hearings

We testified about racial disparities in Illinois nursing homes at a hearing initiated by Sen. Jacqueline Collins.

We participated in the legislative hearing about racial disparities in Illinois nursing homes yesterday.

I felt grateful to be included in the event and positive about our testimony.

Kimbriell Kelly and I constituted the first of six panels that spoke to Public Health and Human Services Committee Chairman William Delgado, Sen. Jacqueline Collins and Sen. Heather Steans.

We focused our testimony on our finding that Illinois is arguably the worst state in the country for black seniors seeking nursing home care.

Kimbriell gave the background to our investigation and identified disparities in location, quality and staffing between facilities where the majority of residents are black compared with those where most of the residents are white.

I elaborated on these disparities and talked about explanations for them that we had heard from nursing home owners and that ultimately proved to be untrue.  These included the assertions that the difference were a function of the percentage of days of resident care paid for by Medicaid and that black seniors tend to enter nursing homes less healthy than their white counterparts.

Each senator seemed very engaged and asked us questions.

After our presentation, the senators heard from workers at several of the majority-black facilities, officials at the Illinois Departments of Public Health and Human Services, and  academics Susan Reed of DePaul University and Ruqaiijah Yearby of the University of Buffalo Law School, among others.

Yearby said she had called both the Illinois Department of Public Health and the Illinois Attorney General’s offices, but neither could tell them who was responsible for enforcing Title VI, or civil rights, violations.

She advocated for the integration of civil rights enforcement with nursing home inspections and made the point that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights had closed no facilities for civil rights violations since the passage of the legislation in 1964.

Some of the day’s most dramatic testimony came from Lurletha Ward, a South Side resident whose sister had lived in the Renaissance at 87th Street facility.  Ward detailed how her sister at times sat in her own feces for hours.  She added that when she raised a concern to home officials, she was told that she could move her loved one elsewhere if she didn’t like the treatment her sister was receiving

Legislative attention to nursing homes will continue on Tuesday, November 5, with a public hearing about safety in nursing homes and resident placement.

Nursing Homes Racial Disparities Hearing Today

Since last year, a team of us at The Chicago Reporter have worked on a project about racial disparities in nursing homes in Chicago, Illinois and the nation.

Starting in the spring this year, members of the Civic Action Network, another part of the Community Renewal Society to which the Reporter belongs, have demonstrated against disparities in homes owned by Mr. Floyd Schlossberg.

Today, in addition to some of the people who participated in the protests and academics Ruqaiijah Yearby and Susan Reed, editor Kimbriell Kelly and I will be presenting some of our findings at a statewide legislative hearing called by Sen. Jacqueline Collins.

While quality care is a concern for all seniors, unfortunately, there are significant differences in the number, quality and staffing levels of homes where the majority of residents are black and where the majority of residents are white.

In fact, Illinois is arguably the worst state in the country for black seniors seeking nursing home care.

Illinois has the highest number of black nursing homes that received the lowest possible rating-a 1-star on a 5-star rating scale-of any state in the country.  None of the 51 majority black homes received a rating of excellent.

By contrast, a far lower percentage of white homes in Illinois received the lowest rating and a much higher percentage of these facilities earned the top score from the federal government.

There are seven other states that also have no excellent black homes.  Among those, Illinois has the highest number of of these homes.

Some people with whom we spoke criticized the five-star rating system, so we built databases of civil court cases filed against Chicago nursing homes and incidents investigated by the Illinois Department of Public Health.

We found consistent patterns of disparities here, too.

We also found significant differences between the amount of staff hours per resident given and the percentage of that care give by registered nurses, the most qualified nursing staff.

Some sources said the disparities could be explained in part by the percentage of days of resident care paid for by Medicaid.

We tested that assertion and found that it wasn’t true.

In Chicago, black seniors receive worse care than white seniors, even when both are poor.

This has been a project I have wanted to work on since I worked for Martin Clayton at the South Shore Community News on the city’s South Side in 2004 and 2005.

To see it elicit the response it has thus far has been extremely gratifying on personal and professional levels as well as an indication of just how severe the problem is.

Antisemitic comment, community conversation policies.

I received an antisemitic comment yesterday.

Without getting into too many details, the sender’s name was “Adolf Hitler” and the thoughts expressed were unambiguously offensive.

After some deliberation, I deleted it.

I very much want this space to be a community where people around the world can express strongly held beliefs, opinions and ideas.

It gives me great satisfaction and joy that the community has continued to build in numbers, comments and countries.

The post I wrote about President Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize, for example, elicited comments from readers in France, Chile, and Tibet, among other countries.

Dear friend David Axelrad appears to read regularly in Hungary.

I want to be clear that I encourage passionate and heated disagreement about what I and others have to say.

At the same time, I will not tolerate derogatory or hateful comments.

Thanks again for reading, and I look forward to continuing the conversation.

20,000 Page View Mark, Thanks.

This is just a quick note to say that due to a bump in traffic the past couple of days, we are over 20,000 page views for the month.

That’s an average of 1,000 page views per day.

Thanks to everyone who through your reading and comments are helping the community grow!

Time’s Special Report on Women, Joan Borysenko on the Woman’s Book of Life and O’Toole and Lawler on The New American Workplace

Joan Borysenko's book about the feminine life cycle deepens the understanding of readers who also looked at Time's special report about women.

Time Magazine has a “special report” about women in America that sheds little light or heat.

The print package consists primarily of an opening essay by staffer Nancy Gibbs, some survey results and a guest essay by Maria Shriver that both plugs her new book and says that her mother might have become president, had she run today.

The gist of the report is that women have, to quote the old Virginia Slims motto, come a long way, baby, but sustained losses along the way.  Today’s women are more independent and powerful than the women about whom Time did a similar report in the early 70s, but they also feel less satisfied and content.

In some ways, the report is a metaphor for what has happened to Time, which appears to be floundering and casting about for a direction.  The magazine seems caught between a reduced operating budget and lack of strategic vision, at times looking to be an incubator of ideas while at the same time giving people the quick informational hits to which they have become accustomed.

In all, the report was neither satisfying nor enlightening.

Readers wanting to learn more about woman’s life cycle would be well advised to read Joan Borysenko’s A Woman’s Book of LIfe: The Biology, Psychology and Spirituality of the Feminine Life Cycle.  Borysenko takes the reader through a dozen seven-year cycles by telling the story of Julia, a composite protagonist.  In each of the twelve sections, Borysenko writes accessibly about the interconnected  physical, spiritual and emotional realms women experience.  She draws from a wide range of thinkers and offers both an impressive synthesis of several distinct disciplines as well as a cyclical and continually changing vision of life.

The Time report also focused a lot on women at work and noted the milestone that the number of women may actually surpass that of men.  Those wanting to explore that area further might enjoy The New American Workplace by James O’Toole and Edward E. Lawler III. Like the magazine, the two authors are returning to an area they first examined about 30 years ago in the bestselling Work in America, which I have not yet read.

People in the work world will not be surprised to read about the changes to more independence and flexibility and less security that have occurred within the American workplace. Similarly, the authors’ call for educational reform is not groundbreaking, but another reminder of the importance of preparing our nation’s youth.

Both books provide a deeper and more textured look at their topics than the Time report. In this regard, women may have made progress, but, unfortunately, the magazine has not.