lovehistory.net

As I read through Carl Zimring’s Clean and White, it took me several chapters to figure out what exactly his book is about. The story eventually reveals that Zimring is interested in how racial roles became associated and disassociated with environmental conditions in cities, specifically waste management. This made the chapter on Thomas Jefferson at the beginning quite confusing – was this Zimring’s attempt to trace the origins of dirtiness being conflated with race? If so the first half or even first 3/4 of the book offered nothing particularly enlightening that hasn’t been argued or explained by other authors before. Further, the information did not generate an in-depth discussion of the links between dirtiness and race. It felt as if Zimring was only scratching the surface. Only during the last chapters and the sanitation strike does the book seem to take a more refreshing turn, and Zimring’s work begs for another book written about race and what he labels the Environmental Justice movement of the 1970s-1980s. Too much of the argument here is implicit and too much of the history is summation of what has come before. While an interesting topic, Clean and White fails to deliver on its promise.

Apollo in the Age of Aquarius is about the way NASA influenced social movements and social movements influenced NASA in the 1960s and 70s. The author covers a wide range of social movements, which can give it the feel of an overview, and sometimes he loses his chronology, as his book is ordered topically. But I thought his argument was interesting and he clearly did his research. The Vietnam chapter was interesting but not altogether convincing, though kudos to Maher for digging up what he did on the Vietnamese and Russians in space. Maher has a really interesting argument to be made and a good framework for analysis, but there are so many moving parts that sometimes that analysis gets condensed down to just a sentence, and falls a bit flat. While he has really interesting and detailed examinations of each social movement he discusses, and did very impressive work with his primary sources, he does not link the social movements together very well, which I think is odd because they were concomitant and also in dialogue with each other. I learned a lot from the book, and I think it’s a valuable read and addition to the canon, but there were some weak spots that left me wanting more.

There is something to be said in the discipline of history for simply telling a story, and in that this book has much in common with Hurricane Camille: Monster Storm of the Gulf Coast, published only a year earlier and with the same goal of giving the storm’s survivors a voice in the historical record. Category 5 broadens its sites beyond the survivors to encompass the scientists who played such an important role in determining the path and power of the hurricane, and also in including the stories of local and state government officials whose job it was to respond to the storm. In this way Category 5 gives a more complete picture of the depth and meaning of the devastation. However, it is the narratives of the survivors themselves that take precedence over scanty but tantalizing analysis of survivor’s relationships with the government, and the way race and class define disasters for distinct groups of people. Category 5 would have been a much longer but more academically fulfilling book if it has given these issues the same amount of weight and page length as it did to the harrowing narratives of survival told in the oral histories the authors mined and conducted. This kind of analysis might have added further depth of our understanding of what happened in Hurricane Katrina, which happened the same year Category 5 was published. Also missing is a more piercing look at the role of the federal government in the disaster, another pressing topic when compared with FEMA’s current-day failure to abate the horror in New Orleans. Because of its human interest angle the book is readable and interesting, but as an academic text it fails to adequately scratch below the surface of what happens during disaster to what makes it one in the first place