The Ville served as the cradle of African-American culture and nurtured its rich heritage for the black population of St. Today, the soaring Ville Monument pays tribute to the neighborhood’s achievements and its famous sons and daughters. Catonsville, Catonsville, Maryland. 11,223 likes 6,408 talking about this. What's going on in Catonsville? Keeping you updated with local news, events, happenings and changes in the 'Ville.
``You're not in Kansas anymore,' proclaims a popular Brooklyn T-shirt, the words emblazoned above an illustration of a smoking gun. Donaldson's report on a year in the borough's baddest ghetto brings that warning home with power and compassion. To center his story of Brownsville's urban blight, Donaldson (a freelance writer and Brooklyn schoolteacher) focuses on the days of one cop and one kid—both black, the cop young Housing officer Gary Lemite, the kid 17-year-old Sharron Corley. As time passes, summer to spring, each succumbs to the violence that drenches the area, a warren of forbidding housing projects and tenements: Lemite, though a decent cop, grows more ready to use his fists and his gun; Sharron—the heart of Donaldson's story—though basically a good kid despite his allegiance to a shoplifting gang (Polo clothes only), can't resist the ghetto code of the triumph of the fittest, and ends up doing a terrifying stint behind bars for stealing, with an ice pick, a jacket from another, weaker kid.
Donaldson's clear but shocking message is that in the desperately poor, drug-ridden inner city (further brought to life by the author's tracking of several local hoodlums, including a notorious crack-dealing family), even good kids must be at ease with violence in order to survive. But there's hope in the ghetto too, personified by the principal of, as well as a teacher at, the area's tough high school—courageous women who speak the language of the streets and use it to try to keep their students from dying young.
Full of charged moments—Sharron marveling like an alien visitor at the clean wonders of white Brooklyn, or grieving for his dead baby son, or standing down a threat to his life—Donaldson's account vivifies the humanity of ghetto residents on both sides of the law, and stands as one of the most gripping inner-city chronicles of recent years. The chief White House and Washington correspondent for ABC provides a ringside seat to a disaster-ridden Oval Office.It is Karl to whom we owe the current popularity of a learned Latin term. Lewis ( The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds, 2016, etc.) turns timely political reporting he published in Vanity Fair into a book about federal government bureaucracies during the first year of the Donald Trump presidency.At first, the author’s curiosity about the relationship between individual citizens and massive federal agencies supported by taxpayer dollars did not lead him to believe the book would become a searing indictment of Trump. However, Lewis wisely allowed the evidence to dictate the narrative, resulting in a book-length indictment of Trump’s disastrous administration. The leading charge of the indictment is what Lewis terms “willful ignorance.” Neither Trump nor his appointees to head government agencies have demonstrated even the slightest curiosity about how those agencies actually function. After Trump’s election in November 2016, nobody from his soon-to-be-inaugurated administration visited federal agencies despite thorough preparation within those agencies to assist in a traditionally nonpartisan transition.
Lewis primarily focuses on the Energy Department, the Agriculture Department, and the Commerce Department. To provide context, he contrasts the competent transition teams assembled after the previous elections of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Displaying his usual meticulous research and fluid prose, the author makes the federal bureaucracy come alive by focusing on a few individuals within each agency with fascinating—and sometimes heartwarming—backstories. In addition, Lewis explains why each of those individuals is important to the citizenry due to their sometimes-arcane but always crucial roles within the government. Throughout the book, unforgettable tidbits emerge, such as the disclosure by a Forbes magazine compiler of the world’s wealthiest individuals list that only three tycoons have intentionally misled the list’s compilers—one of the three is Trump, and another is Wilbur Ross, appointed by Trump as Commerce Secretary.As with nearly all of Lewis’ books, this one succeeds on so many levels, including as a well-written primer on how the government serves citizens in underappreciated ways.