Mark Pendergrast’s approach in City on the Verge integrates insights from the realm of urban planning, history, anthropology, and politics to weave a story about Atlanta’s birth and rebirth and its development into a teeming cosmopolitan city in the heart of the American South. The history of Atlanta and Georgia is replete with struggles by civil rights activists against the scourge of racism, segregation, and violence.
Pendergrast writes about this history, tying it to a city that began as a railway stop, was burned to the ground by General Sherman during the Civil War, and has arisen from those ashes to become a crucial transportation, media, music, and corporate hub for the United States—and the world. I bought this book as part of the research I undertook for The BeltLine Chronicles, an epic poem about a poet named “George” (after George Gordon Lord Byron) who quests on the Atlanta BeltLine, a 22-mile railway track that has been converted into a pedestrian and cycling path. Pendergrast’s wide-ranging and informative book provided a sociohistorical backdrop for my poem which, thanks to a grant from Art on the BeltLine, is now being posted on Atlanta’s BeltLine. Pendergrast chronicles Atlanta’s complex and troubled history, and provides fascinating insights into a “city on the verge” of modeling promising new urban pathways and revitalized public spaces.
Pendergrast uses an array of approaches, including references to his own upbringing in Atlanta, historical documents, and interviews focused in particular upon homelessness, to weave a story of tragedy, redemption, and hope.
Atlanta is on the verge of either tremendous rebirth or inexorable decline. The perfect storm for failed American urban policies, Atlanta has the highest income inequality in the entire country; urban renewal attempts that unwittingly destroyed neighborhoods; highways arrogantly blasted through the city center; the longest commutes in the nation; suburban sprawl that impairs the environment even as it erodes the urban tax base and exacerbates a long history of racial injustice. While many cities across America suffer from some or all of these problems,, nowhere but Atlanta have they so dangerously collided. City on the Verge is a dramatic…
Louis Menand’s monumental corpus of works combines his deep and intimate knowledge of America’s cultural works, European histories, world politics, and political struggles into a sprawling assessment of art and thought that begins with his previous book, The Metaphysical Club, and runs through the Cold War’s conception and representation of The Free World. Menand’s writing is always deeply engaging, captivating, and clear, fueled by his extraordinary knowledge and resolute devotion to central intellectual questions.
I have engaged with some of the realms with which he has truck on account of my own writings about Noam Chomsky’s and Zellig Harris’s milieus, and I’m inspired by his capacity to engage the many realms that inform complex milieus and fraught historical times.
"An engrossing and impossibly wide-ranging project . . . In The Free World, every seat is a good one." ―Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post
"The Free World sparkles. Fully original, beautifully written . . . One hopes Menand has a sequel in mind. The bar is set very high." ―David Oshinsky, The New York Times Book Review | Editors' Choice
One of The New York Times's 100 best books of 2021 | One of The Washington Post's 50 best nonfiction books of 2021 | A Mother Jones best book of 2021
In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical…
Since I’m currently writing about the 1965-1968 negotiation of a modern refugee treaty to accommodate post-1951 asylum seekers, particularly in the US, I have read deeply into the struggles, challenges, and victories in the domain of US Civil Rights. Of central concern to me is the extraordinary work of James Baldwin, which, in its aesthetic and political dimensions, demands careful and sustained engagement with his work and his life.
I signed up to audit a course on Baldwin with Ed Pavlic, whose superb work on Baldwin has been incredibly helpful. To prepare myself for this study, I read and listened to David Leeming’s biography. This is a very intimate portrait of Baldwin, based on Leeming’s own relationship with him, alongside a deeply sensitive reading of his works and portrayal of the times to which Baldwin contributed. It’s a moving, touching, and resolutely personal biography that has remained with me and inspired me to keep questing to understand Baldwin’s extraordinary life and work.
"The most revealing and subjectively penetrating assessment of Baldwin's life yet published." -The New York Times Book Review. "The first Baldwin biography in which one can recognize the human features of this brilliant, troubled, principled, supremely courageous man." -Boston Globe
James Baldwin was one of the great writers of the last century. In works that have become part of the American canon-Go Tell It on a Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Another Country, The Fire Next Time, and The Evidence of Things Not Seen-he explored issues of race and racism in America, class distinction, and sexual difference.
In this novel approach to law and literature, I dive into the canon of so-called great books and discover that many beloved characters therein encounter obstacles similar to those faced by contemporary refugees and undocumented persons.
The struggles of Odysseus, Moses, Aeneas, Dante, Satan, Dracula, and Alice in Wonderland, among many others, provide surprising insights into current discussions about those who have left untenable situations in their home countries in search of legal protection.
Law students, lawyers, social scientists, literary scholars, and general readers who are interested in learning about international refugee law and immigration regulations in home and host countries will find herein a plethora of details about border crossings, including those undertaken to flee pandemics, civil unrest, racism, intolerance, war, forced marriage, or limited opportunities in their home countries.
