Tracy Kidder’s stunning Strength in What Remains tells the unbelievable-if-it-wasn’t-true story of Deo, a Burundian medical student who barely escapes the 1994 genocide in his country and finds his way to New York City, where, penniless and speaking no English, he sleeps for a time in Central Park. Taken in by a nun, then adopted by an American family, he enrolls in Columbia University and goes on to Harvard Medical School. Then he goes back to Burundi and opens a health clinic, Village Health Works, which provides sorely needed medical services to Burundians, most of whom live in dire poverty.

Tracy Kidder writes, “He [Deo] had gleaned Burundi’s statistics from various sources. These were some he liked to cite at fund-raisers for his yet to be built clinic: an average life expectancy of about thirty-nine years; one in five deaths caused by waterborne diseases or lack of sanitation; severe malnutrition for 54 percent of children under five; for women, a one-in-nine lifetime risk of dying during childbirth; and fewer than three hundred doctors to serve a population of about seven million.” (226) Below are some striking statistics documenting the current heath status in Burundi—named the world’s poorest country by the World Bank in 2006.

8.2 million: Population total in millions

67: Percentage of the population living below the poverty line

53: Percentage of children under five who suffered from stunting due to inadequate food, low-quality diet, poor infant feeding practices, poor household management of childhood diseases and the general decline of the health system

50+: Percentage of women who deliver at home without the assistance of a qualified professional

41/1,000: Portion of children (live births) who die within four weeks of birth

64: Percentage of the population that has access to potable drinking water

32: Percentage of the population that use adequate sanitation facilities

34: Percentage of births attended to by skilled personnel

200: Number of physicians

49: Life Expectancy at birth

1100/100,000: Maternal Mortality Rate (live births)

63.1: Percentage of children under five years of age who are stunted for age

38.9: Percentage of children under five years of age who are underweight for age

Source: UNICEF

David Owen, author of the book Green Metropolis, explains how New York City’s structure makes its residents live greener — and how other cities should follow the example.

The 2008 primary race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is to politics junkies what Hank Aaron’s 715^th homerun is to baseball fans.

The race stretched what has typically been a momentum game hinging on a handful of states into a months-long scramble for delegates that left no voter feeling ignored. It changed the way presidential primaries are run, perhaps permanently.

On the eve of the New Hampshire primary, all indications were that Barack Obama was on his way to a decisive victory. He had the momentum after winning the Iowa caucuses, and some polls had him 10 points up. A win may well have set him up for a clean sweep towards the Democratic nomination. That, of course, didn’t happen. Clinton beat Obama by three percentage points in New Hampshire and split the delegates, opening a door for the long battle that would follow.

How did Obama blow it?  His campaign manager David Plouffe, in The Audacity to Win, his arresting insider account of Obama’s legendary campaign, offers a four-point explanation, which he calls “Plouffe’s Primer on How to Lose a Sure Thing.”

1) Hillary cried. In a close race in a small state, even trivial incidents can become game changers. When Clinton’s eyes welled up in response to a voter’s question about her perseverance just days before the primary, it dominated the television news cycle and showed a softer side of her that many voters had been missing. “There was a very fertile group of New Hampshire voters who had always liked her,” Plouffe writes, “and this raw moment brought them home.”

2) Independents went for McCain. Long before Obama and John McCain butted heads on the campaign trail, the Republican senator may have unintentionally tripped up his future rival. New Hampshire’s open election laws allow citizens to vote in either party’s primary. With an Obama win looking solid, many pro-Obama independents opted to instead throw their two cents into the more scattered Republican race, mostly for McCain. Plouffe recalls many voters telling canvassers on the final night: “Your guy is going to win. I think McCain is the best Republican, it will give us a good choice. But I’m voting Obama in November.”

3) Obama didn’t punch back. With polls showing him comfortably ahead, the Obama campaign opted to play things straight even as Clinton’s campaign attacks grew more pointed and frequent. The cool approach allowed Clinton to gradually tear away at Obama’s armor. “We were too confident in our position and treated her attacks as discrete issues,” Plouffe writes, “and not as the broad opportunity they presented.”

4) They seemed just a little cocky. Whether it was the case or just perception, Plouffe acknowledges that Obama appeared to stride into New Hampshire a little too smoothly, giving an impression he considered the contest in the bag. While it made sense to play off his momentum, in a state as proud as New Hampshire the image may have rubbed some voters the wrong way. Plouffe writes: “New Hampshire loves underdogs and punishes overconfident front-runners. The voters had not been ready to call the race over.”

Googled: Biography Of A Company, And An Age
The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta tells Terry Gross that although the company trumpets free access to information, it is notoriously tight-lipped when it comes to its own formula for success. (Fresh Air with Terry Gross)

The Obama the Campaign Knew
New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani says The Audacity to Win, by Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, gives readers “a visceral sense of the 2008 presidential campaign from an insider’s point of view.” (New York Times)

Rick Hertzberg’s Victory Dance
Bryan Curtis finds Hendrik Hertzberg’s “rollicking” ¡Obámanos!—The Birth of a New Political Era, the book of “a liberal knee-jerker doing an end zone dance.” (The Daily Beast)

“There is a belief among some, that the international community (presence) will continue whatever happens because of the strategic importance of Afghanistan. I would like to emphasise that that’s not true.”

-Kai Eide, the UN Special Representative in Kabul, delivered a pointed warning to the government of Hamid Karzai, speaking yesterday, when the United Nations temporarily pulled half its international staff out of Afghanistan following an attack last week on a UN guesthouse in the heart of the Afghan capital, Kabul, in which five UN international staff were killed by gunmen. (Times of London)

* Related Title: Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World by Samantha Power

Democrats Push Forth with Climate Bill Despite Republican Opposition

“The failure of the Republicans to participate means we cannot offer amendments. This is a very good start, but as the chair has acknowledged it is a start and only a start. It is regrettable that we could not move forward in a more constructive way.”

- Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., speaking as Senate Democrats pushed a precedent-setting climate bill through a key committee Thursday, ignoring a Republican boycott. (Associated Press)

* Related Title: Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis by Al Gore

Lawmakers Brace for Tight Vote on Health Care Reform

“I think it’s going to be close.”

- Democratic Rep. Steny Hoyer told reporters he expected the House to pass a sweeping healthcare overhaul on Saturday, but acknowledged that the vote would be close. (Associated Press)

* Related Title: Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform by Howard Dean with Igor Volsky and Faiz Shakir

New Yorker writer and author David Owen tells how Jane Jacobs’ book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, influenced his own writing of Green Metropolis in the latest in our Open Books video series.

Join us tonight for another edition of Book Talk Radio, the online radio show of the Progressive Book Club. The show starts at 8pm Eastern.

Call in at (347) 934-0465.

Republican Gomorrah—Blumenthal’s remarkable, muckraking debut—is a bestiary of dysfunction, scandal, and crime from the heart of the movement that runs the Republican Party. He describes the people and the beliefs that establishment Republicans—like John McCain—need to kowtow to if they have any hope of running for president, and how moderates have been systematically purged from party ranks.

One year on from the historic 2008 election, we asked Todd Gitlin, noted author, professor, and member of Progressive Book Club editorial board to rate Barack Obama’s performance in office. Here’s his reply.

Obama, One Year On

by Todd Gitlin

Yes, we did.  And the millennium did not arrive.  So what showed up instead?

After a few sorely, sorely needed moments of exulting and exhaling, more rounds in the unceasing fight between the forces of progressive reform and the forces of rollback and retrogression.  There are battles won, battles lost, battles still in overtime, and positioning for battles not yet begun.

Many of us were galvanized last year by Barack Obama’s suppleness of mind, his eloquence and ease, his all-around thoughtfulness, policy mastery, and the care and subtlety of Dreams of My Father—an actual writerly book!  (Has anyone else ever rendered the arduous labors of community organizing, or the shadings of racial identity, as plausibly as he did there?)  It was natural to envision him rallying stadiums full of besotted masses to cow the forces of reaction whenever they reared their stony walls.  It was easy to neglect, in the artfulness of his campaigning, and then his inaugural, the dead weight of political reality that would push back when he promoted his program.  The pushback arrived.  The good news is that he can learn and lead, as when he bounced back from the dismal August of “death panels” with his fine September 9 speech to a joint session of Congress.

At this writing, a version of health care reform is likely to come to fruition soon.  Obama had a plausible strategy for dividing the opposition—mainly, peeling the drug companies away from the insurance companies.  This scheme was more successful than not, but Blue Dog Democrats in cahoots with a solid front of Republicans in the flagrantly undemocratic Senate were able to come to the rescue of the insurance companies, as if they had exalted constitutional standing.  The result will be less than the desirable single-payer system (never politically in the cards), less even than a robust public option, but still a prologue to that, a close shot at universality, some cost-cutting, and a precedent for later improvements.  Even if he had amped up his rhetoric against the insurance companies, and twisted arms for the public option, it’s hard to see how a better result was possible. Read More

It’s hard to believe it’s been a year–and what a year–since Barack Obama one the presidency. Everyone has his or her memories of Election Night (some of them shared here). In this excerpt from his new book, ¡Obamanos! The Birth of a New Political Era, New Yorker writer Hendrik Hertzberg shares his:

People, naturally, were dancing in the streets. On upper Madison Avenue, north of 110th Street, exuberant knots of teenagers frolicked and waved. When we stopped at a traffic light, our driver clicked the door locks and rolled up the windows. We rolled them right down again. A dreadlocked young man ran straight for us, followed by his friends, chanting, “O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!‚” He reached into the cab and slapped palms with us one by one.

We got out at 125th Street and headed west. The cops had closed the street off at Fifth Avenue. Every horn was honking, and it had nothing to do with traffic frustration. At the plaza in front of the New York State office building, at Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, a.k.a. Seventh Avenue, where a jumbotron had been set up, people filled every square foot for blocks in every direction. The crowd was a photographic negative of the population of the United States: mostly black, ten or twelve percent white, lots of in between. When Obama appeared on the giant screen and his voice came through the speakers, the crowd quieted and listened. People murmured and nodded and many faces were wet.

Afterwards, we joined the flow west toward the Broadway subway, which comes out of the ground and passes high overhead on a trestle at 125th Street. In the doorways of apartment buildings people stood and watched the parade and exchanged smiles and V-signs and thumbs-ups. Teenage girls skipped along, slapping every palm within reach. Couples embraced. A big man ran past us exultantly; he had wrapped himself in an American flag like a shawl

Jaywalking is usually illegal, frustrating for drivers and sometimes dangerous — but it’s good for a city.

In Green Metropolis, David Owen points out that jaywalking not only slows traffic, makes drivers more cautious, and gives foot-travelers more autonomy on the streets, but it also encourages walking by creating more efficient means to do so.

Owen isn’t alone — on Monday, Tom Vanderbilt of Slate wrote his own defense for jaywalkers:

“Certainly, there are egregious jaywalkers who defy logic and physics in their wayward perambulations. (Many of these are drunk people; as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration notes, “about 25 percent of fatally injured pedestrians have a BAC greater than .20″). And, conversely, there are also careful jaywalkers, like myself, who frankly find the notion of waiting for a signal when no cars are in sight to be faintly ridiculous and anti-urban.”

The “anti-urban” argument hinges on the idea that a city’s vitality is contingent on its residents’ autonomy. When people are forced to form daily walking routes in a way that makes car travel easier, they are bowing to a form of transportation that is impractical for small city streets but also, Owen says, less energy efficient.

Vanderbilt and Owen both propose that the solution is not to steer pedestrians out of the way of cars — ticketing for jaywalking, building cross-walks — but rather to make walking the presiding (and eventually, the main) form of transportation. Reevaluating the structure of a cities on this accord is obviously a much more tenuous task than simply funding a project that redirects foot traffic, but it’s well worth a debate and in many cities, long overdue.