The Six-Point Inspection

The People’s Republic, the People’s Car, and the People’s Rebels

Brave Dragons, Thinking Small, and Rebel Rulers

February 21, 2012

In The Six-Point Inspection, Zócalo takes a quick look at new books that are changing the way we see our world. Brave Dragons: A Chinese Basketball Team, an American Coach, and Two Cultures Clashing by Jim Yardley The nutshell: What happens when an ex-NBA coach lands at the helm of one of the worst teams [...]

Read More

The Six-Point Inspection: Archives

The Far East, the Midwest, and a British Intellectual

Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom, The Big Empty, and Thinking the Twentieth Century

On February 14, 2012

In The Six-Point Inspection, Zócalo takes a quick look at new books that are changing the way we see our world.

Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War by Stephen R. Platt

Read More

Construction, Comics, and Crips

Highway Under the Hudson, Mutants and Mystics, and Power Concedes Nothing

On January 31, 2012

In The Six-Point Inspection, Zócalo takes a quick look at new books that are changing the way we see our world.

Highway Under the Hudson: A History of the Holland Tunnel by Robert W. Jackson

Read More

Debt, Grief, and Disappointment

Borrow, Kayak Morning, and Not in Our Lifetimes

On January 24, 2012

In The Six-Point Inspection, Zócalo takes a quick look at new books that are changing the way we see our world.

Borrow: The American Way of Debt by Louis Hyman


The nutshell: Cornell University economic historian Louis Hyman traces American debt from the invention of the Ford Model-T—which everyone paid for in cash—to the rise of credit card debt in the 1990s and the mortgage crisis that triggered the current downturn. He argues that we focus too much on how businesses lend rather than on why Americans borrow. …

Read More

Genes, Egyptians, and Jews

The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess, The Struggle for Egypt, and Jews and Booze

On January 17, 2012

In The Six-Point Inspection, Zócalo takes a quick look at new books that are changing the way we see our world.

The Wandering Gene and the Indian Princess: Race, Religion, and DNA by Jeff Wheelwright

The nutshell: History, science writing, and investigative journalism merge to tell a story of genes, disease, and religion that moves from the mountains of the American Southwest to the labs of Manhattan. Journalist Jeff Wheelwright’s jumping-off point is the death of a 28-year-old Hispano woman in Colorado—and her family’s discovery that they carry a BRCA1 gene mutation that that afflicts Ashkenazi Jews, and increases their risk of breast cancer. …

Read More

Articles

Feuilleton
Friday, December 3, 2010
How One Family Created Chinese America
Zócalo

The Lucky Ones, by Mae Ngai The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America by Mae Ngai Hyphenated cultures seem to be a natural part of California’s landscape today, but it wasn’t always so. The Lucky Ones by Mae Ngai offers a fresh look at California history by reconstructing the lives of immigrant and second generation pioneers who lived between cultures when it was not such a common phenomenon. Ngai’s narrative brings Chinese Americans into a richer tradition of historical storytelling by humanizing an ambivalent, middle-class immigrant family, situating their lives within the more well-known histories of Chinese laborers and those who suffered from the 1882 Exclusion Act.

Poetry
This week in L.A.
From the green room
 
Connecting People to Ideas and to Each Other

Thank you to Zócalo sponsors:

 

 

Wordpress template made by HeJian