book reviews – Page 2 – Erhardt Graeff

Mutual Aid book review

18 July 2022Erhardt GraeffLeave a comment

Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis by Dean Spade
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wonderful, quick, and practical volume on what mutual aid is, why it is important, and how to create and sustain a mutual aid program. Dean Spade writes with the clarity and confidence of a seasoned veteran of organizing and movement building. Mutual Aid is a nice companion to my favorite organizing books by adrienne maree brown. It lacks the holistic and spiritual qualities of doing social change work that brown’s Emergent Strategy series does, instead focusing on the practicalities of getting work done. Use them together to develop a robust approach to your own social change practice, that ideally places mutual aid—one of the most powerful strategies—at the heart of your efforts.

As an academic, I would have liked to see more references to literature on mutual aid because I know scholars have written about it and want to follow up on the sources. I also understand that this is not an academic volume and scholars are not (and should not be) the primary audience. The practical tools that are compiled here are formidable. I expect all folks engaged in changemaking will find something of value perhaps new in this book. The penultimate chapter “No Masters, No Flakes” was stuffed with practical ideas and frameworks. I learned about Mad Mapping there for the first time and love the idea of creating a guide to your future self for how to deal with burnout.

As Spade urges, we need more mutual aid efforts in the world and we need more folks reading this book and applying its ideas!

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Palaces for the People book review

18 July 202218 July 2022Erhardt GraeffLeave a comment

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life by Eric Klinenberg
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I had been looking forward to reading this book since it came out and finally cracked it on summer vacation. It’s an excellent popular sociology volume that mixes original research with literature review and journalistic storytelling. The core argument of the value and importance of our social infrastructure is inspirational to folks who design spaces and try to cultivate community through their work. It’s also a beautiful love letter to libraries, one of our best examples of social infrastructure. The value we place on libraries in the United States is really uneven. Like K-12 schooling, everyone has opinion about what libraries are good for because they went to one as a kid and it either was important to them or it wasn’t or they believe it worked for them in one way and that’s how it always should be or all libraries are like that and thus irrelevant today. We make a lot of assumptions about our social infrastructure in general. It’s hard to analyze one’s own environment. Thankfully, Eric Klinenberg helps us see what’s there and what’s not and what the potential of good social infrastructure design is. I highly recommend it!

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Thick book review

27 July 2021Erhardt GraeffLeave a comment

Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Thick is an excellent collection of Black feminist essays. We are lucky to have Tressie McMillan Cottom’s brain and pen. As an academic trained in sociology, I particularly appreciate Cottom’s approach of blending candid personal narrative, social theory, social scientific facts, and clear as day opinion. These essays are highly readable for a non-academic audience, yet she doesn’t dumb down the ideas or pull any punches. She is asking us to do the work.

The book revisits other pieces she has written. Some of the essays are revisions, others are new responses to conversations sparked by old essays. She writes to clarify her own thinking and make clear the social world surrounding us from the perspectives we usually don’t hear or ignore. Thus, her essays include narratives and metanarratives. Cottom helps us understand why and how she writes. And she explains her specific goals and vision for a society that listens to Black women, that takes their experience and wisdom seriously. There aren’t any hidden agendas here; they are out in the open. She wants us to discuss them. That’s the point.

I love her voice (she is also great in her interviews on television and radio), and I look forward to future collections of her writing.

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What Can a Body Do? book review

27 February 202128 February 2021Erhardt GraeffLeave a comment

What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World by Sara Hendren
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Disclosure: The author is a friend and a colleague. I have known her and her work for 10+ years. As part of the Awesome Foundation in Boston I helped select her Accessible Icon Project to receive a $1000 grant to print and distribute its graffiti stickers.

Though I know the author personally and have been excited for her fully realized thesis on disability and design, I am confident in saying this book deserves 5 stars for the last chapter alone. Hendren’s reflection on how she came to appreciate “crip time” as the parent of a son with Down syndrome is profoundly moving and insightful. The chapter is anchored by her honest retelling of the difficulty of shifting her mindset and moving past the dehumanizing and stigmatizing industrial age narratives of productivity, efficiency, and ordinality of people, by which medical professionals and many in society view her son. By connecting with a wider community of people with disabilities and those who love and respect them, she slowly refines a lens on the world that offers a better narrative, a society in which we choose humanity, dignity, and interdependency—a world we could build together.

The introduction to What Can a Body Do? sets the themes for the book—forcing us to rethink our conceptions of disability and people with disabilities and consider the innovative energy they have always brought to the world and how our world has been made better by it. When we understand that all technology is actually assistive technology and all bodies are different, we free ourselves from many limiting beliefs about what design is and should do. We also appreciate the beauty possible in all expressions of life and that we are all deserving of spaces and things that allow us to express ourselves.

I related to this book even though I am someone dripping with privilege and ability. White, male, cisgender, cissexual, able-bodied, and able-minded, I have few attributes that would be described as disability. My tallness is usually understood as a particularly desirable trait. But that does not mean that technology and the built world are necessarily friendly to me. This book gave me some language and perspective to make sense of my own experience. My body is not average. Fixed seats on buses and airplanes can be painfully uncomfortable to me. In fact, I am asked to pay more to find a seat that fits me on a flight. When bodies defy the narrow boundaries of “normal,” outliers like me can sometimes seek (or pay for) “accommodation” or they might be left out.

Mass production, just like the mass housing of people with disabilities to provide specialized medical care, is a modern phenomenon. We used to tailor clothing, furniture, spaces, and understood the members of our family with disabilities as family members, different like everyone was different. It took (and continues to take) disability-rights activists to shame us as a society into seeing the dehumanizing and disempowering ways we had built the world, assuming those with bodies and minds outside of the statistical average were not really a part of our world. In the process, these activists have given us curb cuts for parents with strollers and older people. They gave us spaces and mobility options reserved for people with disabilities, so that they can easily access public and private places through close parking spaces, ramps, and elevators. We all benefit from these features.

Through chapters challenging our preconceived notions about limbs, chairs, rooms, streets, and clocks, Sara Hendren provides a tour through the built world and we meet people who have met the challenges posed by a world not designed for them through invention, grace, and prophetic visions of what we could be and do together. I strongly recommend this book to my colleagues in the design and engineering fields but also to many interested in civics and democracy. The questions the author poses are about what we should value, how we should see ourselves in the world, how we should relate to one another, and how we define diversity, inclusion, and community.

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Democracy May Not Exist But We’ll Miss it When It’s Gone book review

1 February 2021Erhardt GraeffLeave a comment

Democracy May Not Exist But We’ll Miss it When It’s Gone by Astra Taylor
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the companion book to Astra Taylor’s excellent documentary What is Democracy? Many of the interviews, historical references, and scenes are fleshed out here and organized around a more pointed argument than the documentary offers. Where the film pursues curiosity about the true meaning of democracy and how it is meant to function through the lenses of historical definitions and contemporary history, Taylor’s book explores many of the tensions inherent to democracy to help us understand its fragility as a concept and practice and warn us that we are at risk of losing the bits of democracy we have established in modern times.

Democracy’s contradictions and tensions, especially its modern coevolution with capitalism, allow it to be exploited easily in ways that undermine its own ideals. Its strength and weakness is its fluidity. Most importantly, it is dependent on a shared belief of its citizens that this is how we want to govern ourselves, and a commitment to collaborate together to preserve it. This all makes democracy rare and precious and, as I said, fragile.

Taylor marshals a wide range of philosophy, literature, history, and contemporary commentary to present her case. The book is erudite and insightful in the juxtapositions in provides, like the movies Taylor makes as a skilled documentarian. At times, though, it feels a bit thrown together and winding. Being organized around themes, means it often lacks the compelling, cohesive narrative that makes you want to keep reading past the parts that don’t grab you as strongly. The book seems little confused about what it wants to be—straddling the line between an academic volume and a popular press book—but not quite succeeding as either. The book would have benefited from an edit developing stronger storytelling at the book and chapter levels to structure its narrative.

I still think Taylor’s contribution here as an amateur democratic theorist and observer of contemporary society is impressive. Right now, we are all looking for some guidance on how to make sense of democracy, and I think Taylor’s book will be instructive for many, especially in helping make sense of why democracy is not “the end of history,” but is rather an unlikely dance we have found ourselves in. And if we don’t pay attention and work together, “we’ll miss it when it’s gone.”

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