Some of it reads like an ethnic studies tome
358285
Some of it reads like an ethnic studies tome. The politically correct multi-culti flavor puts one off. It has a very leftist approach to what should be an unbiased description. I wish that I had not bought it.
895284
For my unacademic interest in this obscure group of Americans, the detail here was a bit smothering. But the author does raise some good points in his comments on racial attitudes.  But he seems to contend that there is no such thing as race and then spends much of the book talking about race. Not a bad read for a long plane ride.
1622863
There are a few good suggestions in this book.
2804303
I agree with most that it is well organized, easily understood, and up to date.

I just caution potential readers that it is just slightly slanted. Imagine that from a book on politics right? In my humble opinion if someone depended on this book alone they might come to the conclusion that Americans are and only ever where caucasian and free. For example in Ch. 2 (page 30) it states that "most Americans owned small farms or worked as middle class artisans and craftsman." It goes on to say that there was "general economic equality". I felt that this statement completely and deliberately ignored the existence of impoverished slaves, indentured servants, and Native Americans.

I would caution any professor planning to use this book as their text to take a closer look.
3591960
This book just had lists of literature and books that loosely relate to the cultures.  The unit on Africa focuses on African Americans at times and not a lot on actual African Culture.  The focus of this whole book is mainly about literature that different cultures have using Folk Tales.  There is not a lot on practices of different cultures for students to explore.  The worksheets and everything is just stuff I could have thought up myself or googled.  It was cheap so I don't mind it, but not a great resource.
332265
It's packed with information with some truth and some untruth.  Overall I found it to be a slanted rendition of the history of early contact between indigenous Americans and Europeans.
1723576
Some of the writing is too heady and academic for me, and probably for most readers.
But one nice thing about a book of collected essays, such as this one, is that the reader can skip around and read what interests him or her. And there is certainly some interesting reading here.
I'm a fan, and the book has served to deepen my understanding of the band and the music.
3547843
I forced myself to read this book club book because the people who selected it usually get it right.  I don't think it was that badly written, but only because I appreciate how much effort went into weaving the story into the culture, rather than the other way around.  It could have been a non-fiction book explaining how foreigners in difficult situations in their native countries can emigrate to the United States and better their lives.  But since Ms. Freudenberg wrote this as a novel, I read it with due respect.  I gave it three stars and not four because the principal male character was so hard to fathom.  Also, there was a great deal of description of umpteen family members and their relationships, which made it hard to follow.  The character of Kim was the most compelling, although toward the end of the book Amina's craftiness shows up and adds an interesting dimension to her persona.  I was indeed moved by the plight of the poor in an emerging nation,-- the most admirable dimension of the book from my point of view.
2441847
This is a mildly interesting book that explores aspects of Japanese culture from a Westerner's point of view.  The cover of my edition describes it as an "extraordinarily evocative, at times erotic," story.  Given that the book is ostensibly about the steamy nightlife of the mizu shoubai, one might expect a rather heady description of what goes on after dark in Japan.  Despite the title, the book does not particularly concern itself with the water trade.  When it does, it is often just a description of the author sitting in some little bar or other drinking.  The book does devote lengthy stretches to things like calligraphy and home furnishings, and perhaps it's just me, but I found it rather boring.

It is hard to imagine who the target audience for this book would be.  For those with little knowledge of Japan, many of the descriptions lack enough context to make much sense.  For persons already acquainted with the culture, the long musings are hardly revealing and some of the author's conclusions are questionable.  Ultimately, it feels like the author wrote this as memoir for himself.  It should give hope to diarists everywhere that they too can one day be published.  There are a few genuinely evocative moments in this book (especially notable was a good description of a funeral), but hardly enough to justify the time it takes to read it.
2197221
There is certainly information of value here, but the number of words and pages used to get the points across is far too many. In its attempt to be culturally inclusive it tries to be universal in its description of different death concepts, and I think you lose some depth of substance to the discussion this way.
3297275
The mainland during the 1940s was mostly just white and Black, with rigid segregation and anti-miscegenation laws.  Hawaii of that time had many races and they married and mingled if not freely than without as much stigma.  In Hawaii, Portuguese and (European-phenotyped?) Puerto Ricans were not deemed "haole," the Hawaiian term most often used for whites.  Add into the mix that far more men, as soldiers, came to the islands during the war.  Add these two opposites together and there was a radical alteration of race, gender, and possibly class in Hawaii.
This book is accessible to non-academic readers without being insulting to one's intelligence.  The authors use letters, military reports, local newspapers, etc. to paint a picture, from multiple perspectives about this wartime juxtaposition.
The first chapter initially talked about Hawaii, hours before Pearl Harbor's attack, generally and it made me suspicious that the work would be boring.  However, the authors were really trying to ground that while sex and dancing and racism and intermarriage where going on, folk were still worried about housing and TV and what's for dinner.  The chapters become more interesting as you progress through the book, so you may want to read the last chapters first.
My one critique about this book is that oftentimes interracial dynamics were scant.  In the prostitution chapter, it seemed that clients and workers were only of the majority group.  The chapter on sex spoke much more about same-race interactions and then only slowly moved to interracial counterparts.  I am especially interested in the dynamics between people of color and the chapter on African Americans in the highly diverse Hawaii said little about how Black got along with brown, yellow, and calico.
If you are fascinated by Hawaii, diversity, intersectional analyses, how wars uproot trends, etc., then you will enjoy this book.  It's quite impressive.
3966277
I picked this up because I'm working on becoming bilingual, and was intrigued by the title and topic.  The author is on a search to diagnose polyglots and draw conclusions about the nature of them.  The book has interesting parts describing, unearthing, and in some cases exposing overstated claims of multiple languages mastery.  The journey has its moments, but bogs down, especially in the latter part of the book.  To his credit the author approaches his investigation in an academic way, but that may cause the casual reader to lose interest as the book progresses.  At first I felt I was gaining useful insight, but ultimately I'm not sure I should have invested the time.
2019242
The cover art is really quite accurate; the title however suggests a broader point of view and that is just not the case.
My mother was a full blooded basque born in this country and her mother ran a boarding house on the lower east side of Manhattan for Spanish and Basque merchant mariners and travelers. My grandfather was a founding member of the Centro Basco(New York Basque Club) in New York City.  They had the boarding house in the 1920s and early 1930s, and so it was not uncommon to have Basque meals in my mother's house as we grew up.

I expected more in the way of ethnic recipes as opposed to or in addition to western recipes.  I just don't remember my mother shopping for steelhead or trout or salmon. And salt cod with potatoes and onions - maybe bacalao a la vizcaina instead, and I found the "Basque style paella" curious.  I'm also pretty sure we never had a sheep wagon omelet.

I thought the "lore" section seemed to be high school essay material.  There may be better books out there and you may want to keep searching or try your library for this one.

bob p
2205147
The authors present some interesting information as well as some research methods that one wouldn't expect to be used in the manner they present. However, the data, the conclusions of the research, the background stories, and the premise are not all that compelling to me.
2498466
Apart from the semi-racist title, a good little book!
2138508
I rated this book at three stars, and feel generous in doing so. It DOES have a lot of listings, so I guess I shouldn't be too harsh in my review, but I found it dissapointing overall. I currently live in Virginia, where it can be argued that the Native American and English languages have overlapped longer than anywhere on the continent and as might be expected there are numerous place names either derived or taken directly from the native inhabitants. Yet most of those names are not listed in this book at all, and when they are they are either misidentified geographically or unclear as to their history. On the other hand, just readig through the book as I'm inclined to do with any 'encyclopedic' work, I found myself questioning the explanations about how several English sounding names are supposedly derived from native words.

The book does seem much more useful with regard to certain geographic areas, perhaps because the 'experts' who contributed were concentrated in certain areas. And I have to admit that I have spent an hour at a time more than once just browsing through the book out of genuine curiosity, not looking up anything but instead just soaking up the information it contains. Having volunteered that experience, overall I still quite honestly feel that I wasted my money on this thick block of dead tree version, when a quick or maybe a not so quick but more in-depth web search can reveal much of, and in some cases more than, the information contained in this book.
4627455
I bought this book because I want to study an issue that so many people living in America's (and Europe's ) urban centers are talking and arguing about, to try to get more insight into the topic.
The authors call this book an "auto-ethnography" and it does seem to be that. There is a good exploration of some of the subtleties and contradictions in the study of "gentrification."  However, I would have liked the authors to go farther and take a broader perspective.  For me, many of the limitations of the book come from their definition of "gentrification" which they define on pg 4 as having to do with "middle-class people moving into divested neighborhoods in a period during which a critical mass of other middle class people did the same, thereby exerting economic, political and social pressures upon the existing community."  For me this definition is too narrow, as is the term "gentrification".

There's an inherent problem in the term "gentrification" as its' used now, which is that it takes just one kind of change to a community and vilifies it, while apparently. ignoring or viewing as neutral all other types of changes to a community.  Gentrification is viewed as a modern phenomenon, (the term being coined in 1964) ...but communities and use of their claimed spaces have been changing for far longer than that, and I can't see leaving out this whole part of the picture.

For instance, in California, the original indigenous inhabitants of the Bay Area were Native Americans.  Then along came the first "gentrifiers", the Spanish nobility, who obtained ranchos or land grants from the Spanish crown or Mexico, and took over the lands.  Then these ranchos were lost in part by fraud, in part by hardship, and were subdivided and sold to settlers -- the next set of "gentrifiers."  Settlers and farmers then were in turn "gentrified" out by those building early cities and towns.
Though many people in Oakland (for example) now refer to whites who move into majority black neighborhoods as "gentrifiers", the fact is that at the city's start, in 1854, it is possible that no black citizens lived in the city at all. It would have been mostly hispanic rancho owners and whites at the time of its founding.  Even just prior to WWII, only 3% of Oakland's population was black.  Seen in this context, it seems legitimate to question why there is a need to view black communities as somehow owning the city or parts of it.
The point being, that places change, and it seems oddly narrow to only look at some parts of this change and to vilify some forms of change and not others.  Shall we call working class people who move into a middle class or upper class area, as "slummifiers" or "ghettoizers"?  On pg 134 of their book, the authors describe Spike Lee complaining that his father has lived in the area since 1968 and played jazz music there, but now the new people moving into their neighborhood are calling the cops on him due to the noise.  But this problem also occurs exactly in reverse.  Noisy working class people move into nice quiet middle class areas and ruin them.  You have a quiet middle class or upper middle class neighborhood, and then a working class family moves in and starts using their front lawn to park greasy and dumpy cars they are working on, plays loud music on weeknights, has friends come over late at night who use their car horn as a doorbell to say I'm here. In other words, bring ghetto behavior to middle class areas.
And this problem can occur in a widespread way, and has, in many cities which have decayed by the influx of working class or underclass into formerly middle class areas.  But where are the articles and books vilifiying such slummification or ghettoization of formerly nice areas? Fair is fair......it seems ridiculous to me to demonize some forms of change while ignoring others which may actually cause more serious social problems.