Books
Short takes
by Sam Finnemore
One day in the late 1980s, student Sudhir Venkatesh walked into the Chicago projects to hand out questionnaires about urban poverty: “How does it feel to be black and poor?” That combination of naivety and sheer nerve gets a solid airing in GANG LEADER FOR A DAY (Penguin/Allen Lane, $37), in which an older, wiser sociologist looks back on his decade living with the crack-dealing Black Kings. The book’s broad observations about the positions of gangs in poor communities are unimpeachable but somehow seem less than startling 10 years down the line. What really grips is Venkatesh’s tale of his fraught contacts with the locals.
In Christchurch native Hamish Beaton’s engaging account of teaching high-school English in Osaka, UNDER THE OSAKAN SUN (Awa Press, $34.99), he recounts the complexities of personal and professional life in Japan. His teaching colleagues are awkward, he gets sick, he gets heroically drunk, he fails repeatedly to get a date. In another travel writer’s hands, it could have fallen easily into whining, but Beaton has a gift for self-deprecation, and the good humour is set against some genuinely moving episodes with Osakan friends and his “young minnow” special-needs students.
When offered a publishing deal for a book about his father, Bernard Cooper jumped at the chance to try to make meaningful contact with the cantankerous, diffident ex-lawyer. THE BILL FOR MY FATHER (Picador, $27.99) is a devastating portrait of the last years of a difficult relationship, marked by searing arguments, estrangements, legal threats and a bill for parental services received. The roots of the conflict emerge through Cooper’s blackly humorous and heartbreaking writing, and the book utterly nails a pained father-son dynamic
