“Beryl Satter's Family Properties is really an incredible book. It is, by far, the best book I've ever read on the relationship between blacks and Jews. That's because it hones in on the relationship between one specific black community and one specific Jewish community and thus revels in the particular humanity of all its actors.” —Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic Part family story and part urban history, a landmark investigation of segregation and urban decay in Chicago -- and cities across the nation The "promised land" for thousands of Southern blacks, postwar Chicago quickly became the most segregated city in the North, the site of the nation's worst ghettos and the target of Martin Luther King Jr.'s first campaign beyond the South. In this powerful book, Beryl Satter identifies the true causes of the city's black slums and the ruin of urban neighborhoods throughout the country: not, as some have argued, black pathology, the culture of poverty, or white flight, but a widespread and institutionalized system of legal and financial exploitation. In Satter's riveting account of a city in crisis, unscrupulous lawyers, slumlords, and speculators are pitched against religious reformers, community organizers, and an impassioned attorney who launched a crusade against the profiteers—the author's father, Mark J. Satter. At the heart of the struggle stand the black migrants who, having left the South with its legacy of sharecropping, suddenly find themselves caught in a new kind of debt peonage. Satter shows the interlocking forces at work in their oppression: the discriminatory practices of the banking industry; the federal policies that created the country's shameful "dual housing market"; the economic anxieties that fueled white violence; and the tempting profits to be made by preying on the city's most vulnerable population. Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America is a monumental work of history, this tale of racism and real estate, politics and finance, will forever change our understanding of the forces that transformed urban America. "Gripping . . . This painstaking portrayal of the human costs of financial racism is the most important book yet written on the black freedom struggle in the urban North."—David Garrow, The Washington Post

" Inspired by treasured family memoirs and musings, Susan J. Gordon' s work strikes a chord of connections in the hearts of her many readers. Many of her early childhood experiences were instrumental in shaping her lifelong love of writing. " Most of her pieces are about universal topics such as marriage, family life, parenting, being Jewish, family histories, and growing up in a family of divorce. Over the years, they were published in many well-known, popular magazines and newspapers. " ' Childhood is as fleeting as falling leaves,' Gordon says, ' and home is where we can find our way in the dark. There are no secrets in families-- just things no one wants to talk about. The past is always present, I believe, whether or not we are conscious of it.' " -- Anne Garry, former Managing Editor of Victoria " Gordon' s research on the historical context of relatives' lives, and her explorations of family secrets and myths are models for the genealogical community." -- Renee Steinig, genealogist and former president of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Long Island

The formally nuanced and wise epistolary poems in David Biespiel?s new collection are grounded in friendship, camaraderie, and the vulnerability and boldness that defines America. Roving from the old Confederacy of Biespiel's native South to Portland, Oregon, Charming Gardeners explores the wildness of the Northwest, the avenues of Washington, D.C., the coal fields of West Virginia, and an endless stretch of airplanes and hotel rooms from New York to Texas to California. These poems explore the ?insistent murmurs? of memory and the emotional connections between individuals and history, as well as the bonds of brotherhood, the ghosts of America?s wars, and the vibrancy of love, sex, and intimacy. We are offered poems addressed to family, friends, poets, and political rivals ? all in a masterful idiom Robert Pinsky has called Biespiel?s ?own original grand style.? I should stop back there And stand on both feet in the grazing sunlight And hear this chorus of America singing. But I am so afraid of the testament of the delivered. from ?TO __________ FROM THE JEWISH CEMETERY IN WILLIAMSON, WEST VIRGINIA