Archive | Book Matters
Rereading the 12th Street Riot
It’s been five decades since the 1967 Detroit Riot, but the issues surrounding it are as urgent as they’ve ever been. Certainly they’re as divisive. Witness how U.S. citizens can’t even agree on whether to refer to it as a riot or a rebellion. What we do agree on is that the six-day uprising was one of the most violent in our country’s history, and that it presaged a new era in race relations in America, not to mention a totally misguded movie that has only succeeded in tanking Kathryn Bigelow’s career.
The 12th Street Riot, as it also was called, began when white police officers raided an after-hours club in a mostly black neighborhood, and long-simmering anger about the police force’s racism boiled over along with frustrations about segregationist employment, housing, and education policies. When all was said and done, entire city blocks were burnt down, 43 people were dead, 1,189 were injured, more than 7,000 had been arrested, and 683 buildings were destroyed. A presidential commission later determined that “police officers shot at least twenty people to death, and Army troops and National Guardsmen killed up to ten more.” All but ten of the forty-three killed were black. Continue Reading →
Kinsey Millhone Is My Kind of Dick
One very terrible summer, I was jobless, in the wake of a breakup, and looking at the wrong side of thirty-five. “I don’t know what to do with myself,” I told a librarian friend. “Read the Kinsey Millhone mysteries,” she said. “They’re bestsellers for a reason and there’s a ton of them.” By the summer’s end, lone-wolf private detective Kinsey had become my first fictional bestie since I’d ostensibly grown out of rereading Harriet the Spy at age 12. (I never really did.)
It’s no coincidence, that Harriet connection. Grumpy, idiosyncratic, and eminently decent, the subject of Sue Grafton’s bestselling alphabet series is the sort of tough-guy tomboy rarely found outside of children’s literature to all of our detriment. Like the love child of Mickey Spillane and Ramona Quimby, Kinsey suffers no fools and is only partially domesticated. Orphaned young, divorced twice, and child-free, she’s a former cop who prefers pickle and peanut butter sandwiches over salads, lifts free weights, cuts her own hair with nail scissors, and owns only one dress–a wrinkle-resistant black number for when she can’t get away with jeans and turtlenecks. Shacked up with a Japanese bobtail cat Ed in a garage apartment owned by Henry, her eighty-eight-year-old retired baker of a best friend, she regularly swills cheap white wine and frightening goulash at the local tavern with a handful of cops whom she sometimes dates and consults in the delightfully lo-fi world of 1980s Santa Teresa, a fictionalized Southern California town resembling Santa Barbara, where Grafton lives part-time. Continue Reading →