Our favorite books 2004

Thinking About Crime notes that disproportionate punishments do "enormous damage to the lives of black Americans." But this is an academic book; it doesn't really say what "damage" means.

A talented journalist, though, can communicate human loss. That's what Jennifer Gonnerman, staff writer for The Village Voice, does in Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett.

Bartlett, a twenty-six-year-old, poor, black mother of four, traveled from New York City to Albany to sell four grams of cocaine in 1983. It was her first drug sale, Gonnerman writes. A man Bartlett thought of as her friend had offered her an easy way to make $2,500. But Bartlett's "friend" turned out to be a snitch. Bartlett got twenty years in prison for her first offense.

Gonnerman recounts Bartlett's life, and those of her mother and her four children, from the day of her arrest. When Bartlett wins clemency, she struggles to fit back into a family that raised itself in her absence. Gonnerman captures both the love and the decades of grief that envelop the entire Bartlett clan.

This powerful book shows in detail what unfair sentences do--to the convicts, but also to their neighborhoods and families.

Just a snippet from Eleanor Wilner's The Girl with Bees in Her Hair. Equally preoccupied with the lessons of myth and the problems of the present, these morally engaged poems treat such subjects as the Iraq War and America's corporate downsizing fad (which she compares to that anxiety-driven game musical chairs).

In "The White-Throated Sparrow Can't Compare," Wilner describes a sparrow beneath a sky filled with bombers, then writes:

   And now the very thought of him
   has flown; the mind can't hold for
   long
   the sparrow and the bombers
   in a single thought. Mad
   to make them share a line, as if
   to balance power so unequal
   on the creaking fulcrum
   of the merest and:

   a pennyworth
   of weight with its live, pensive song
   against a roaring overhead--pure
   dread,
   its leaden tonnage, and its tongue.

These lines, like so much of Wilner's work, are accurate, disturbing, and profound.

Anne-Marie Cusac is Investigative Reporter of The Progressive.

by Elizabeth DiNovella

Between the war and the election, I spent too much of 2004 thinking about the past (Who knew what when?) and the future (President Who?). These two books reminded me to pay attention to my surroundings and to literally keep my eyes open.

One of my favorite parts of the urban landscape is street art. I first fell in love with it during a trip to Berlin in 1984. I didn't expect to see colorful murals, graffiti, and stencils plastered all over the Wall, and the art's immediacy electrified me. This summer, someone stenciled an amusing face on the mailbox outside my apartment building. I smiled every time I saw it (though I did feel a bit sorry for the worker trying to remove it a few weeks later).

Josh MacPhee loves street art, too, evidenced by his book Stencil Pirates: A Global Study of the Street Stencil. MacPhee delivers a short history of this public art form that hasn't received as much attention as murals or graffiti, despite its ubiquity.