eengland's reviews
200 reviews

I was going to give this a 3-star after the first half because it really should have been a 30-page article and it's super redundant but then I got to part 2 where they dropped this bomb on p76 about analyzing intra-city movers vs suburb movers: "Families who moved to city census tracts with less than 7 percent unemployment rate, less than 7 percent below poverty level, or more than 25 percent college graduates were eliminated to reduce heterogeneity in the city sample and make a clearer contrast to suburbs." Like wtf. For a book dedicated to discussing the geography of opportunity hypothesis, that's pretty shoddy work that honestly makes me doubt the academic rigor of Northwestern University as a whole based off this single work by these two professors of theirs. Also makes me doubt the validity of sociology as a field. That's like saying "we're going to be analyzing horses and donkeys in great detail but for clarity's sake, we're going to ignore the existence of mules entirely" even though that clearly adds a huge layer of depth and understanding to the discussion at hand. Also the second part especially just really read like two rich white dudes armchair-anthropologisting it up with poor Black women and children's lives and just got pretty cringe. Get off the verandah, my dudes. P104: "In sum, research suggests that under certain circumstances, Blacks and whites can interact and form friendships." ... you needed a PhD and a giant-ass research project to tell you that? Yikes. And the number of times the authors contradicted themselves with gems like "12% cited safety as being a top reason to move" and in the next paragraph saying "safety was one of the top reasons program participants chose to move"...... I'm no statistician but like 12% does not sound like a majority opinion (especially when listed alongside other reasons shared among like 36-75% of participants) and thus, I am not inspired to great confidence in the authors' intelligence and their conclusions' validity.

Concise, packed with good info, not much floof, well-researched.

Absolutely riddled with typos and formatting flaws. A third of the citations seem to be Wikipedia or more dubious internet sources. One website is listed as www.http/[domain].com. Probably another third of the citations are self-citations (e.g., "Personal recollection" or "this was me" or "History taken from an article I wrote for a Lerner newspaper in 1988") (admittedly it felt like half the citations, but that's probably an exaggeration). Some blatant falsehoods regarding surrounding events, including the attempted Nazi demonstration in Skokie. Interesting read nonetheless and good to learn more about Rabbi Neil Brief who was a community cornerstone for many years. Wish there would have been more about him and his legacy, a more critical analysis of both, and more solid research and rigorous fact-checking, but alas.

This book does a lot - all amazing. Should be required reading. Some of her histories get a little too broad and vague for my tastes but to be expected with such sweeping works.