Thank you for your recent article on the African American Health Program of Montgomery County and the When I Get Out Program (W.I.G.O.). Our program relies on media like you to help us spread the word about the programs and services that we offer the residents of Montgomery County.
In the article located on page 32 of the July/August 2010 paper Darlene Coles, Project Director, was quoted as saying "we're the only organization that addresses health disparities." This is actually not accurate. Along with the African American Health Program, there are two other Minority Health Initiatives created within the Montgomery County Department of Health and Human Services that address health disparities.
It's clear from most of your editorial copy that you value young people, so why would you allow inclusion of "Best place to avoid if you hate teenagers" in your listings for the Best of TPSS? Certainly you wouldn't ask people to identify "Best place to avoid if you hate Jews" or "Best place to avoid if you hate Latinos" or even "Best place to avoid if you hate old people."
by Rom Verdonk
Living in Baghdad the credit side of the ledger is thinly populated, but one plus is that I have more time to read. Even though we work six or seven days a week, when we do have free time it's ours. Sometimes I pick up a book from a table in my apartment lobby, but I've also picked up a few while visiting reconstruction teams in places like Tikrit, Diyala and Najaf.
All the books I've liked this past year are about places and faces far removed from Baghdad. With summer here I offer the following list for your enjoyment.
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
by Alexandra Fuller
The daughter of transplanted English parents gives us the good and bad of growing up in rural Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, with a snippet of life in Malawi. Wonderful dialogue and rich, as-if-you-were-there descriptions of Africans and expatriates and the beauty and challenges of coming of age in Africa.
When You're Engulfed In Flames
by David Sedaris
Be prepared to laugh. Waiting several hours at the landing zone in Diyala for a helicopter, there were passages where I thought I would fall from the benches. Such is this writer's ability to usher us into encounters from childhood to life in the French countryside and a visit to Tokyo to quit smoking with unfailing hilarity.
Yes I Can, The Story of Sammy Davis Jr.
by Sammy Davis Jr.
"Bits," "Jazz" and "Zingy" get thrown around in this autobiography. It's a time we wish was behind us, though it is not completely so. Be prepared for hundreds of heavy pages detailing the racism and plain stupidity that one of America's greatest entertainers who rose to prominence in the 1960s had to face day in and day out. From the little bit I remember of him as kid, I thought Sammy Davis Jr. was an Uncle Tom, but this book re-educated me.
The Happy Isles of Oceania
by Paul Theroux
One of my favorite writers, though I think he is sometimes overly critical of the cultures he visits, he begins this book in New Zealand and ends in Hawaii and hits just about every intervening speck of land in the Pacific. He tells us what's going on in the lives of the islanders living in the nooks and crannies in places most of us will never get to see. Like the image you may conjure of the South Pacific, this book is relaxing and full of a variety of people, kind of like a day at the beach.
River of No Reprieve
by Jeffrey Tayler
It's a travelogue, though I wasn't sure I'd much care about a swatch of life in east-central Russia. The writer teams up with his guide, Vadim, for a raft trip up the Lena River. They start in Bratsk and a few months later make it 2,500 miles to the Arctic Circle. Reading about the unforgiving terrain they traverse, you begin to see beauty in the Russian wilderness, but I was struck by the sad conditions of people in the villages and towns they passed through. You begin to wonder if there's a sober soul in this remote, isolated hinterland.
Voices
by Trula Michaels LaCalle
This book deals with the successful efforts of a psychologist to make whole someone with multiple personalities. This was painstaking, time-consuming work, but it was very heartening to read a real-life narrative of triumph over an extremely challenging mental disorder.
Open
by Andre Agassi
I still haven't figured out how to move for an early hit on the ball, but Andre had that driven home by a father whose ways he learned at an early age to hate. This is a very quick read that shows Agassi to be at points fragile and at times a competitor as physically prepared as possible, with huge talent and the necessary ability to put opponents away. I found his recounting of life off the court -- family, tennis school, early flames, Brooke Shields and his own family with Steffi Graf - rather pedestrian but also genuine.
I'm Just Not Myself These Days
by Josh Kilmer Purcell
This is the personal story of a guy in New York who works in advertising by day and as a drag queen at night. As you can imagine, he meets all kinds of interesting folks. With as much vodka as he downs in the course of his after-hours work, however, it's a wonder he was able to write the book at all.
Ron Verdonk normally lives in Takoma Park but is on a State Department assignment in Baghdad. He is writing monthly dispatches for the Voice.
by Gordon Clark
With a nod and apologies to my Voice colleague Abby Bardi, who writes The Sin of the Month column, it's occurred to me we could probably use a Gross Stupidity of the Month column too.
The competition for the dubious honor has been stiff this summer, and so far we have a dead heat for the top spot.
Our first contender has to be General Stanley McChrystal, until a few weeks ago the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. He had the bright idea to allow a reporter from Rolling Stone magazine into his inner sanctum for four weeks, and then spent the better part of that time making derogatory remarks about the Obama Administration. I mean really, who could have ever imagined these comments would make it into print? Have those hippies at Rolling Stone no honor?
by Erin Ehrlich
If you are a Takoma Park homeowner, you know your home increased in value over the past decade. How much? The typical single-family home in Takoma Park has more than doubled in value between 2000 and 2008, from $194,000 to $416,000. Prices have come down somewhat since the recession began, but prices remain much higher than they were ten years ago.
What about local renters? Almost one in four pay more than one-third of their income on housing expenses, which labels them "housing cost burdened."
Are these trends cause for concern? If so, what should be done about it?
CHEER - Community Health and Empowerment through Education and Research - gives the Takoma Park and Long Branch communities an opportunity to speak up.
"CHEER embodies a new vision of what local democracy can be, in that everybody in the whole community participates and gets a voice," said Bruce Baker, executive director.
by Gordon Clark
It was three weeks after the oil well started spewing millions of gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico that I heard a radio reporter ask the increasingly commonplace question - "Where's the outrage?"
Here's a better question: where isn't the outrage?
I'm outraged that 11 men died because a criminally negligent oil company (BP has a track record) was cutting corners to save money. I'm outraged that this same oil company clearly had no plan, no idea what to do in the event of such a catastrophic accident. I'm outraged that their methods of "cleaning up" the oil haven't changed since the Exxon Valdez spill 20 years ago, and that most of them are either ineffective (booms that only work when the sea is calm), or worse than the oil itself (dumping highly toxic "dispersant" into the ocean). I'm outraged that they have clearly lied about how much oil is pouring into the Gulf and are trying to keep reporters from seeing the worst damage.
by Joe Cirincione
When I moved to Takoma Park with my wife, Priscilla, and daughter, Amy, 29 years ago, it was already a Nuclear-Free Zone. I have been working on nuclear weapons issues ever since and for the first time in my professional career that local stand has a realistic chance of becoming national and global policy.
A big part of the reason is the personal commitment of President Obama to "seek the peace and security of a world free of nuclear weapons." I met the President at a private reception at the end of the Nuclear Security Summit he convened in Washington in April. He spoke passionately about this vision and the need to organize all nations around a series of practical steps towards that goal.
It was the personal high point of a remarkable two weeks that has begun the transformation of US nuclear policy. What some have dubbed, "Nuclear Spring," began April 6 with the release of a new US nuclear strategy that reduced both the role and numbers of nuclear weapons. Then the President flew to Prague on April 8 to sign a new nuclear reductions treaty--New START--with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
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