Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara, 347 pages.

Jai, Pari, and Faiz all live in the same basti (or slum settlement) in an unnamed Indian city. When the second of their classmates  goes missing, Jai believes that he has learned enough from television to become a first class detective and solve the mystery around them. Jais first suspect, a fellow student, is a bully, and connected to a local nationalist group. No one is willing to help, though. The local police are corrupt, and no one with any real power is interested in the fate of the poor, let alone poor children.
Pari is the smart one of the three children, but Jai is somewhat scornful of her advice. Faiz, who holds down a job at a tea shop is too busy to help and tries to convince Jai that the disappearances are the work of malign Djinn, but as the disappearances mount and the children witness too much of the worst that people can do, the truth is more horrifying and prosaic. A compelling book.

White Trash: the 400-Year Untold History of Class in America / Nancy Isenberg, 460 pp.

Nancy Isenberg's massively researched and endnoted text wants to remind Americans that our idea of a classless nation is a myth, and a cruel one.  From the earliest colonial period our country has been home to men and women who have been called, at various times, offscourings, clay-eaters, lubbers, and mudsills along with more familiar epithets.  The commercially-interested settlement companies saw these waste humans as cheap labor and barriers against Native American violence, but not as people deserving of decent land, rights, or respect.  (And speaking of Native Americans, it is not Isenberg's purpose to minimize the destruction of Native peoples or the suffering of African Americans; rather, I believe she is trying to show how the subjugation of a substantial portion of the white population worsened conditions for all and maximized opportunities for exploitation by the very few.)

The early chapters on the colonial period through the Civil War were a blizzard of information, all of it interesting but some of it a bit undigested.  I found myself wishing that she were connecting a few more dots.  The latter portion, from Reconstruction, to the War on Poverty, to today, were terrific.  Her analyses of Elvis, Bill Clinton, Honey Boo Boo, and Sarah Palin, and what each of these (and many others) mean to our culture was great reading.

There is something here to offend almost everyone.  I admire her courageous writing; I was only offended that she did not include a bibliography.  Yikes!