“Disposing of Modernity” by Rebecca Graff

“Disposing of Modernity” by Rebecca Graff

If time travel ever becomes a thing, the Chicago World’s Fair held in 1893 might be one of the leading attractions for time travelers. Here was an exposition, spread across almost 700 acres in Jackson Park, some seven miles from Chicago’s Loop, that sold 27 million tickets in its six-month run. Some 200 buildings were erected that included displays from nations across the world, public comfort stations, soda pavilions, and restaurants. You had electricity and flush toilets for all to use. “Add to all of this an elevated train that looped around the fairgrounds, the sounds of tourists talking mixed with band concerts, sights of ‘Little Egypt’ performing the danse du ventre, or children doing gymnastics in the model kindergarten, smells of baking bread from the French bakery exhibit or beer and wurst from the German Village, and one starts to get a small sense of the teeming character of the 1893 fair,” noted Rebecca Graff, an anthropology professor at Lake Forest College. Graff recalled a teacher telling her grad-school class years earlier that the Chicago fair site was “the center of the world” 100 years ago. That motivated her to find out what was left of the great fair often cited as a watershed moment in the development of modern, industrial American society. The result is captured in Disposing of Modernity: The Archaeology of Garbage and Consumerism During Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair, Graff's book that details some of what lay behind (or under) White City. To fully appreciate the 1893 event in Chicago, one must first understand the concept of a world’s fair. Between 1865 and 1925, 360 million people attended world’s fairs in Europe, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. “Fairs were venues within which to display the growing and changing material world,” noted Graff. The United States, and Chicago, in particular, were pulsing with power in 1893. While the U.S. frontier may have closed (Frederick Jackson Turner made that declaration in Chicago that year), the country was flexing its railroad and steam muscle in the era that became known as the Gilded Age.  Chicago, 20 years removed from the great fire, wanted to show its resurgence at the fair—not only as a meatpacking and transportation center, but also as a city with world-class architects such as Louis Sullivan and a young draftsman named Frank Lloyd Wright. The fair saw the introduction of the frankfurter that became known as the Chicago hot dog. White City was also criticized by Frederick Douglass, then ambassador to Haiti, for excluding African Americans from a more prominent role at the fair.  It was a transformative event. Six months later, it was gone. That kind of conspicuous disposal, the disposing of modernity, is one of the stories of White City.

“The Courtyard” by Alexa Morris and Benjamin Parket

The Nazi occupation of Paris during World War II brought hardship to many, especially if they were Jewish. As German rule tightened, Jewish families were at risk of being rounded up and sent to concentration camps like Auschwitz. The Courtyard is an account of one Jewish family that survived the war thanks to the assistance of brave neighbors and a miracle or two along the way, said Morris, whose father-in law was Ben Parket. Morris said the book came about through her collaboration with Parket, who turns 93 this summer. Before war broke out, the Parkets—Ben, his parents, and two older brothers—lived in a tiny but sunny fourth-floor apartment that overlooked a large, open courtyard, a busy place in the heart of Paris, a center of industry, she said. “The neighborhood was known for woodworking with furniture makers, upholsterers, and painters busy at their trade. Ben’s father, Joseph, was a varnisher who had his workshop in the same courtyard,” said Morris. In August of 1941, Joseph Parket was arrested along with other Jewish men who had immigrated from Eastern Europe. He was detained in a camp outside Paris that would become the primary French gateway to Auschwitz. The first of the miracles occurred when Joseph was released due to illness and sent home in November. “During the entire war, only 800 of the 70,000 people detained at the camp were ever released,” noted Morris. Ben’s father came home and recovered, but in July of 1942, the entire family was marked for arrest. Luckily, a courtyard neighbor who worked at the police station warned the Parket family in advance. The family wound up staying in an empty warehouse nearby. They made do in a single room the size of a one-car garage for two years without electricity, plumbing, or running water. At night, they had to be completely silent. “Protecting the family was a true community effort,” said Morris. Neighboring shopkeepers—a grocer and a deli owner—set aside food for the family each day, food that nine-year-old Ben had to go and collect each day, a task that "should have been terrifying, but Ben said it wasn’t. Perhaps because it was his only time outside, it became his favorite part of the day,” she said. After the war, the Parket family emigrated to Israel before Ben, on his own, traveled to the United States for college. He attended Stanford University and settled in the Bay Area. He was an architect until he retired in his 50s. Perhaps because of the time he spent hiding during the war, Ben developed a passion for the outdoors, said Morris, noting that he remains an avid biker and hiker to this day.

“The Devil’s Castle” by Susanne Paola Antonetta

The horrors of the Holocaust were preceded in Nazi Germany by the conversion of five asylums and an abandoned jail, which were transformed into gas chambers, killing tens of thousands of patients.  That’s a story that Susanne Paola Antonetta tells in The Devil’s Castle, a book that started with the Nazi massacre of the disabled, she said. “The subtitle, Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry’s Troubled History Reverberates Today, grew with the book,” stated Antonetta. ”Euthanasia grew out of the 19th-century eugenics movement, the drive to remove ‘tainted’ hereditary lines from society. Eugenics flourished in the United States before and after the war. It hasn’t ended,” she stated. Antonetta focuses on several people in the history she provides for a book she said took eight years to compile. “I even had to learn another language: German,” she stated. Two of Antonetta’s “heroes” are Paul Schreber, a German judge who was able to make his own case to force his release from an asylum, and Dorothea Buck, a longtime activist who wrote lucidly of her own psychotic episodes. “Buck had a vision in 1936 of Hitler’s coming war proving ‘monstrous.’ Buck’s mother took her to a doctor, the vision of monstrous war a symptom, like the loony cartoon prophet’s apocalypse sign. If only millions of people had had her symptom,” noted Antonetta. Buck died in 2019 at the age of 102, said Antonetta, who “found her book, her talks, her letters.” “I followed her star with her during my own psychotic break,” said the author, who’s had to deal with her own bipolar condition. Another major figure in the book is Emil Kraepelin, a German psychiatrist who was both eugenicist and anti-semite. Kraepelin believed Jews had a natural connection to mental illness, and he trained some of the worst Nazi doctors, noted Antonetta. Kraepelin, who died in 1926, remains popular, even considered “the father of modern psychiatry,” having devised an elaborate system of psychiatric classification, she said. The title of the book refers to what the asylum known as Sonnenstein later became called. Once a castle-fortress dating back to the Middle Ages, the buildings were renovated in the 15th and 16th centuries. In 1811, the Prussian government established an asylum at one end of the sprawling fortress. Antonetta noted that a study of how society treats mental problems shows that ideas on finding a cure often change over time. Under its first director, Ernst Pienitz, Sonnenstein became Europe’s pinnacle asylum, said Antonetta. Pienetz released a quarter of his patients, fully cured, within a year of their entry, remarkable for that time and that patient population, she said. The reputation made Sonnenstein a teaching hospital, the destination for hundreds of doctors to learn how mental illness could be treated humanely , said Antonetta, noting that less than a century later, the once-fabled institution had become a killing ground “where patients died by gas and were thrown in the river below in the form of ash.” While stressing the failures in the treatment of mentally disabled people, Antonetta sees progress being made despite a reliance on drugs for treatment. She looks to the future and calls for change. “It’s time to end the use of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) in psychiatry,” she said. “This work is the fruit of the poisoned tree, in its Kraepelinian roots and in its development by those with a financial stake in finding people ill.”

“Why Q Needs U” by Danny Bate

So where did we get all these letters that children learn as their ABC’s? Danny Bate has the answer in his book, “Why Q Needs U.” Born and raised in England and now living in Prague, Bate is a linguist, writer, broadcaster, and podcaster (A Language I Love is…), Bate admits to being obsessed by language and its history. “Nowadays, the alphabet has become so successful that we rarely recognize its achievement,” he noted in his book regarding the alphabet's development over 4,000 years. “Yet over the course of its long development, nothing is fixed, and every letter has a story to tell.” Bate tells each of the 26 letters' stories, starting logically with A. Tracing the letter’s history from Egypt, through the ancient Phoenicians to the Greeks who gave us “alpha” (as in alphabet), Bate explains how language evolves over time. There’s a certain excitement that comes with discovering where our letters come from. In his review of the book for The Times, James McConnachie seems positively elated: “I have been able to tell everyone within earshot that Q has a tail because it was once a picture of a monkey, that O used to have a dot in the middle because it used to be the Egyptian hieroglyph for an eye, and that A — bear with me here — started life as a picture of an ox’s head (because it used to represent the glottal stop that began the ancient Semitic word for ox, ’alp) and then morphed into a vowel over time while also somehow turning itself upside down, the wonderful result being that the two legs on our capital A started life as … horns. And’alp, of course, became alpha.” English has its quirks, Bate admits. We’re talking about the fact that there’s a hard c (coconut) and a soft c (cigar) and don't forget the “magic e,” which Bate explains is a split digraph. But don’t worry, it all becomes clear once you follow the explanations Bate provides.  We can thank the Romans for coming up with cursive handwriting, and we learn that the letter W is a child of the fall of Rome. Want clarification? Listen to the interview with the author.

“A Little Piece of Cuba” by Barbara Caver

At a time when U.S.-Cuban relations have probably never been worse, there’s Barbara Caver’s “A Little Piece of Cuba,” a book that explores her own journey “to become Cubana-Americana.” Caver’s mother was born in Cuba before leaving for the United States with her family at the age of seven in 1959. While the author, who lives in New York, doesn’t speak Spanish and only visited Cuba for five days in 2017, Caver’s story is a family memoir, her effort to forge a relationship with Cuba. “I’ve traveled to many far-flung places, and Cuba is the only one that I can remember with all five senses,” she wrote.  “For my grandparents, Cuba was in the tiles on the kitchen floor and hanging on the walls of their home, but the walls and floor are taken for granted and not often noticed. My grandmother’s story, my mother’s story, my family’s story belong to them. I have my own version of the Cuban American story to tell, and in that story, I embark on a brave adventure to a forbidden place, curious to know more, and discover that Senora Cuba wanted to know me too,” she noted. On the U.S. political scene, Cuba has become the proverbial football. Depending on which political party is in power, so goes U.S. treatment of Cuba. President Barack Obama visited Cuba in 2016, the same year that Fidel Castro died at the age of 90. Obama loosened restrictions with Cuba, but  President Donald Trump reinstated them when he took office in 2017. In 2022, President Joe Biden eased restrictions on the country once again, only for Trump to restore a hard-line policy upon his return to the White House in 2025. Now Raúl Castro, who stepped down as Cuba's leader in 2018, is back in the news. At age 94, he’s just been indicted by the U.S. Justice Department. That indictment of Castro “comes at a tense time for US-Cuban relations [https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/20/politics/live-news/raul-castro-doj-indictment?post-id=cmpdy85s6000i3b6rl7mboh28], with the Trump administration declaring the Cuban government is a threat to US national security. [https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/16/americas/cubans-prepare-for-us-invasion-latam-intl] Cuba is also dealing with a collapse of its energy sector [https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/13/americas/cuba-russia-energy-crisis-intl-hnk] due to an oil blockade following the U.S. attack on Cuba’s oil-rich ally Venezuela,” stated CNN. Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that widespread blackouts are common on the fuel-starved island. The country of some 10 million people (2 million in Havana) is “trapped in the vise of a repressive regime and punishing American sanctions,” the paper reported. “I worry over the political tensions and embargo. The present policy is not fair to the American people, Cuban Americans, or the Cuban people,” said Caver. To better understand the situation, “I think people need to hear more personal stories about Cuba,” she said.  She provides her own personal story in this book. “If one day you decide to visit Cuba, you find yourself on TripAdvisor or some other website, and you stumble across Casa de Maria Mendoza, well, I hope you know what you’re in for. If you’re looking for mojitos on white sand beaches and rides at sunset in Franken cars, you should move on. Casa Maria offers an unparalleled immersion and exploration into Cuban culture for people who always questioned what it meant to be Cuban…Casa de Maria might just change your life.”