Bombingham?

“The Most Segregated City in America”: City Planning and Civil Rights in Birmingham, 1920-1980 by Charles E. Connerly: University of Virginia Press, 2005, 360 pages, $45.00

Many of the most famous images of the American civil rights movement feature black children staring down white hatred on the school steps and lunch counters of the 1960s South. But according to Charles E. Connerly, professor of urban and regional planning at Florida State, this particular black/white fight—for access to and control of Southern cities’ public services—began much earlier, closer to the turn of the century. It began in the slums of shotgun shacks where most poor blacks were forced to live.

That’s especially true of Birmingham, Ala., founded in 1871 by a group of investors chiefly to take advantage of the developing railroad system, the booming industrial age, and the cheap black labor available to build both from the ground up. Black families were housed in company camp shacks built of scrap lumber, lacking indoor plumbing or electricity, overlooking ditches dotted with raw sewage. The more upwardly mobile might move up to shotgun houses of three rooms, each one lined with several beds, sharing one toilet between several families.

Then came Jim Crow laws, and things really got bad. And woe to those black families who tried to move up and out—even as the city bulldozed entire black neighborhoods to make way for advancements like the University of Alabama Birmingham—into neighborhoods reserved for whites. They were met with threats, lawsuits and bombs. Martin Luther King, Jr., called Birmingham “the most segregated city in America.”

In the first book-length work to detail the link between city planning and civil rights, Connerly points out that protests by the black communities didn’t start with the 1960s. As far back as 1920, black communities had begun to document their positive work, forming civic leagues to improve basic public services. In 1980, Birmingham elected its first black mayor, and began to work on unraveling its racist past. “The Most Segregated City” documents those ensuing 60 years, and the long fight that began at home.

‘Fessing Up

Which Brings Me to You by Steve Almond and Julianna Baggott: Algonquin Books, 2006, 320 pages, $23.95

There’s a familiar scene in movies, where two new lovers lie in each other’s arms and talk about their disastrous past relationships. It is meant to tell us that this relationship is for real. (And if one lover goes on to trace the other’s tragic scar with her finger, there can be no doubt at all.)

Julianna Baggott, an assistant professor of English, has co-authored a novel with writer Steve Almond, and it’s based on the idea that should a potential couple’s sexual records be disclosed to one another pre-coupling, it might improve their chances for future success. Especially a couple of outwardly attractive, modern, and glib but inwardly malformed, born-with-broken-hearts thirty-somethings with sordid sexual histories.

In their book, Which Brings Me to You, two strangers meet at a wedding and end up stumbling into the coatroom for a bit of sex that both assume will remain anonymous. Suddenly he (John) halts operations. “I think I like you,” he bravely whispers. He proposes that, instead of moving forward, the two spend some time writing to one another letters that detail their past relationships, in hopes of offloading baggage and making room for a future with each other. She (Jane) agrees.

Presumably Baggott wrote the Jane letters and Almond wrote those from John, but in any case Jane and John write in different voices that are sustained throughout the book. John’s stories have tighter narratives and Jane’s strike a deeper chord. What they have in common is the glib speech, the ironic tone, the snarkiness typical in this kind of light, hip, literary fare.

They’re trying to exorcise those earlier narratives and their bad endings, and replace them with a new narrative that has all the substance of a Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan movie.

In the end, we’re left with the oft-needed reminder that romantic love is not possible without kindness and trust.

—Nora Fitzgerald

Fire Ant Philosophy?

The Fire Ants by Walter R. Tschinkel: Harvard University Press, 2006, 723 pages, $95.00

When it comes to fire ants, most folk want to know only one thing—how to kill ‘em. Walter Tschinkel wants to know everything but. Judging by his magnum opus The Fire Ants, he dang near does.

The FSU biologist’s book is dense enough with facts and figures to satisfy professionals. Yet Tschinkel’s clear, logical prose and witty style will keep interested lay readers turning pages as he draws them into an alien world of insect biology and society more bizarre than anything ever dreamed up by a science fiction writer.

Arriving in Mobile, Ala., from South America sometime between the two world wars, fire ants spread rapidly to cover the South.

Eradication programs using toxic pesticides failed to halt—or even slow down—the invading ant’s spread. “Wildlife mortality was widespread, domestic livestock and pets died, and birds were eradicated from large areas,” Tschinkel writes of one program. “This disaster . . . helped to move Rachel Carson to write her classic book, Silent Spring.” Indiscriminate pesticide application killed off competing ant species, most likely allowing the aggressive colonizer Solenopsis invicta (which means “unvanquished”) to spread even faster.

Like it or not, fire ants are here to stay, Tschinkel says. When people ask him what to do about the pests, he says (absent a compelling reason for control, such as hypersensitivity to the ant’s venom), “I recommend they leave them alone. They do no harm.”

If people insist on knowing how to kill ‘em, Tschinkel has two bits of standard advice. The second involves poisoned bait. The first, reserved for snide or unpleasant questioners, begins, “Get yourself a brick and a hammer... ”

—Don Wood

Clarissa Light

Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardson, abridged with an introduction by Sheila Ortiz-Taylor: Signet Classics, 2005, 519 pages, $9.95

Samuel Richardson’s 18th-century novel Clarissa was published originally as a work of 2,000 pages. But his readers perhaps didn’t mind its excessive length, for the book was grippingly serialized over a year, in real time, chronicling the 12 months of peril for poor Clarissa as she faced untold indignities and machinations at the hands of her family and her dastardly suitor, Mr. Lovelace.

Not surprisingly, this important novel of 1748, one of the first of the English language, has been abridged numerous times, initially by Richardson himself. The newest abridged edition has been prepared by FSU English professor Sheila Ortiz-Taylor.

The original story is not terribly labyrinthine; the largest part of the book followed at length the endlessly communicated feelings and judgments of Clarissa and her confidante, Anna Howe, presented through their letters to one another. Abridgments of the book, however, have tended to cut through and discard much of the dense growth of these exceedingly emotional exchanges to get to the primary narrative branches that hold the book together. This is despite Samuel Johnson’s warning that “if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself.” Presumably he meant that the cliff-hanging narrative, told with excruciating delay and repetition, would drive you crazy. Rather, he said, “you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment.”

Ortiz-Taylor, however, took the approach favored in earlier abridgments that gave readers more story but let Clarissa and Anna tell it (once more) with feeling. Her volume weighs in at a mere 519 pages, making it a reasonable assignment for college students, and perhaps the more advanced among high-schoolers.

—Nora Fitzgerald