I have very mixed feelings about this book.

On one hand the book is very well written by an author who is obviously very intelligent. (He had me feeling intellectually challenged from time to time, and I consider myself to be a pretty bright person.) He presents, again and again, extremely thought-provoking ideas and profound comments about modern society. And in presenting his biting analysis of today's society he provides glimmers of hope that things can be changed for the better.

On the other hand, I found this book to be very depressing. The descriptions of the sins of the past, in the form of slavery and racial segregation and violence against blacks, are chilling. Today's problems, with lingering discrimination and the commercialization of American society, are also saddening. Sometimes I took a break from reading because the book made me so unhappy.

"American Beach" is a collection of four stories, three short ones and one quite long one. All but the last story are based on Amelia Island on the east coast of Florida next to the Georgia border, where the towns of Fernandina Beach and American Beach are. (The last story is based in Eatonville on the outskirts of Orlando, Florida.) And all but the first of the four stories has racial conflicts as a primary theme.

But Mr. Rymer makes it clear that today's racial problems, serious as they are, are not the biggest problems faced by blacks or by American society in general. He sees big business and it's influence on everything to be a greater source of apathy and alienation and disenfranchisement and environmental destruction.

In the view of Mr. Rymer, unbridled capitalism and the "culture of the corporation" are breaking down the values that the founding fathers stood for and that many generations of Americans up until WW II fought for, such as democracy. As an example he tells about the Disney-owned town of Celebration which proclaims itself to be the reincarnation of the old-fashioned American town, but which requires residents to sign a contract in which they let Disney operate the town without them, the residents, having any significant influence!

One of the author's claims is that cultural poverty can be worse than economic poverty. Blacks are especially hard hit by cultural poverty, having lost their roots when they were abducted from Africa. Black attempts to create their own culture often resulted in their best creations being usurped by the dominant white society and their less fortunate attempts being ridiculed by the whites.

But American society in general lacks roots, being a melting pot society. Added to this is the rise in the power of the corporations, who can transform functioning towns into ghettos on the edge of holiday resorts for the rich, and can commercialize and thus de-fang every kind of cultural protest. Bob Dylan becomes Muzak and street gangs and gun-toting rappers become movie fodder and hit entertainers.

Consumer capitalism has turned culture and even history into proprietary products, merchandise for the masses. And very few, other than Mr. Rymer and a few of the people he writes about in "American Beach", have even noticed the danger.

Highly recommended.

PS. I read the hardcover book, which has the subtitle "A Saga of Race, Wealth, and Memory". The paperback edition has the subtitle "How Progress Robbed a Black Town--And Nation--Of History, Wealth, and Power". I'm guessing both subtitles were dreamed up by the publishers' marketing departments in attempts to sell the book to people who want to read about American race conflicts. Shame on them.

Having just finished "Slaves in the Family" by Edward Ball when I came across this book, I was struck by a completely different slice of black history and the black condition. Here is the story of the great-granddaughter of a black millionaire who leads a very privileged life, attends Oberlin college, has a fairly short but successful career as an opera singer in Europe, and then returns home to see her mother die, the family fortune dissipate and her world fall apart. It is also a plea for historical preservation and environmental protection. A very poignant and yet inspiring true story. I sang with Marvyne Betsch in the College Choir at Oberlin, and can still hear the unique dark timbre of her voice after forty years!

I bought this book because I grew up hearing stories about the "black" beach near Jacksonville and about the beach lady, MaVynee Betsch, and because I attended Spelman College under the extraordinary leadership of Johnetta Betsch Cole and could never believe "the beach lady" was her sister. Their family history is amazing, and timeless. My mother's side of the family is native to northeastern Florida. Rymer's undertaking to expose the world to the richness of these people is laudable. I learned so much about my history and the history of the place where I'm from that I'd never known. I took the book home with me (FL) for the holidays and my family was so deligted to learn so much about home, and to get reacquainted with the familiar things once known, that we had to go out and get additional copies of the book. It will be a standard in our family for years to come. In short, it is compelling and quite informative. To read this book is to get a true appreciation of a people and their glorious,on-going struggle. I highly recommend American Beach.

Gee, I wish I could write a book this good, and I wish all books written were this good. The "afterword" is not to be missed -- Mr. Rymer describes his process of writing the book, and how he, the scientists he interviewed, and most everyone who tried to "understand" Genie, all ended up understanding themselves in some humbling or transformative way. So did I.

I don't have a lot to say that the other reviews haven't addressed, so I'll keep it short.

This is a book about such lofty subjects as neurolinguistics and scientific ethics, yet it remains wonderfully readable to the average (but curious) person. It's a fascinating story (see the other reviews), but Rymer's real achievement here is rendering what could have been dry scientific data interspersed with horrific tales of abuse into a book that at no time exploits its subject for cheap sentimentality. We care about "Genie" because her shot at normal life was twice aborted, not because Rymer simply wants us to.

Recommended to any curious mind.

I have worked as an American Sign Language interpreter, and I am also a qualified behavior specialist. I currently work with autistic teenagers in developing community living skills. I have also worked with adults who have grown up in institutions, and have an array of "institutionalized" behaviors. Thus they have become severely impaired in their daily function, when they might have been habilitated to live independently. No matter how many times I see these situations, each one breaks my heart.

So I have more than a passing interest in the subject of this book.

That parents could strap a child to a chair and provide her no social interaction for thirteen years, with no one knowing boggles the mind. The whole family is a tragedy.

Russ Rymer documents Genie's habilitation after she is discovered, and freed from this captivity. She is more than a tragedy to some people, because she is also a scientific curiosity; she presents an opportunity to study a person who, deprived of social contact past the "critical point" in language development, never develops language skills beyond the semantic level.

Everyone wants a piece of her. Linguists want her, social psychologists want her, developmental psychologists want her; each with a different agenda. As for Genie, it is difficult to fathom what she wants. In the immediate present, she has remarkable non-linguistic communicative skills which she seems to possess intuitively. But what are her hopes, her desires for a permanent living arrangement, an education, she can't communicate, or even correctly understand.

It's no good to assume that she would want what a normal child wants. She doesn't respond to affection, doesn't appear to discriminate between people and objects at first.

The story is heart-breaking and fascinating. Rymer's narrative voice is kind and full of compassion for Genie, and although the book is written in a typical third person academic style, sometimes I felt that the narrator was the only one on Genie's side.

When Rymer senses that readers may need background information, he departs from the story for an aside on linguistic theory, or the story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron. He dips into Montaigne, Locke, Descartes and Chomsky, but it is all relevant as Rymer reports it. We get the dirt on the nasty in-fighting among custodians and scientists as well.

I hesitate to say you will enjoy this book, because the subject is so wrenching; you may cry a few times. But it is a page turner. And you don't need to know anything about linguistics or developmental psychology to appreciate it.

Russ Rymer has composed a series of three essays bound together by a theme of black cultural identity and its often sad conflict with a dominant (or at least more assertive) white culture.

The major essay, composing over half of the book, is the story of MaVynee Betsch. She is a rather eccentric older women who has taken as her life's cause the preservation of a former beach resort of the black middle and upper class. The resort was developed by her father, A.L. Lewis, the millionaire owner of a black insurance business from the 1920s to the 1950s. Rymer, who is white, does a good job of developing the relevance of the resort to the black culture of the time, while providing the historical context for its existence. Both Mr. Lewis's insurance company and the beach resort were the results of white exclusion of blacks, and both met their demise with the legal end of that exclusion. Miss Betsch can't save the insurance company, but she makes amazing strides at preserving American Beach. The essay is long, with many apparent digressions, but the author's sympathy for the Miss Betsch and her amazing character carry it along.

The main essay is preceded by an account of the tragic end to the life of a 33-year-old black man, Dennis Wilson, by a policeman's bullet at a traffic stop. Mr. Rymer develops the man's background and the events leading up to the sad ending as well as its effect on the survivors, both in Mr. Wilson's family and among the policemen involved. Its place in the book as the lead essay is to set the tone of conflict between two cultures, black and white, that basically have the same dreams and values. The story has been and is being replayed in communities all over the country and is now becoming a public policy issue known as racial profiling. To me, Rymer's point is that whites must make an effort to view the issue from the perspective of black people.

The third essay is the best in the book, and is worth reading by itself. It addresses the preservation of the town of Eatonville in central Florida, which has become a symbol of celebration of black American culture. Mr. Rymer compares it with the commercial effort of the Disney conglomerate to develop the planned community of Centennial nearby. Centennial attempts to recreate the past, while Eatonville's citizens succeed in preserving their past. The story again points out the shared values of the two cultures, and the importance of preserving the black culture.

This is a book well worth reading.

I have very mixed feelings about this book.

On one hand the book is very well written by an author who is obviously very intelligent. (He had me feeling intellectually challenged from time to time, and I consider myself to be a pretty bright person.) He presents, again and again, extremely thought-provoking ideas and profound comments about modern society. And in presenting his biting analysis of today's society he provides glimmers of hope that things can be changed for the better.

On the other hand, I found this book to be very depressing. The descriptions of the sins of the past, in the form of slavery and racial segregation and violence against blacks, are chilling. Today's problems, with lingering discrimination and the commercialization of American society, are also saddening. Sometimes I took a break from reading because the book made me so unhappy.

"American Beach" is a collection of four stories, three short ones and one quite long one. All but the last story are based on Amelia Island on the east coast of Florida next to the Georgia border, where the towns of Fernandina Beach and American Beach are. (The last story is based in Eatonville on the outskirts of Orlando, Florida.) And all but the first of the four stories has racial conflicts as a primary theme.

But Mr. Rymer makes it clear that today's racial problems, serious as they are, are not the biggest problems faced by blacks or by American society in general. He sees big business and it's influence on everything to be a greater source of apathy and alienation and disenfranchisement and environmental destruction.

In the view of Mr. Rymer, unbridled capitalism and the "culture of the corporation" are breaking down the values that the founding fathers stood for and that many generations of Americans up until WW II fought for, such as democracy. As an example he tells about the Disney-owned town of Celebration which proclaims itself to be the reincarnation of the old-fashioned American town, but which requires residents to sign a contract in which they let Disney operate the town without them, the residents, having any significant influence!

One of the author's claims is that cultural poverty can be worse than economic poverty. Blacks are especially hard hit by cultural poverty, having lost their roots when they were abducted from Africa. Black attempts to create their own culture often resulted in their best creations being usurped by the dominant white society and their less fortunate attempts being ridiculed by the whites.

But American society in general lacks roots, being a melting pot society. Added to this is the rise in the power of the corporations, who can transform functioning towns into ghettos on the edge of holiday resorts for the rich, and can commercialize and thus de-fang every kind of cultural protest. Bob Dylan becomes Muzak and street gangs and gun-toting rappers become movie fodder and hit entertainers.

Consumer capitalism has turned culture and even history into proprietary products, merchandise for the masses. And very few, other than Mr. Rymer and a few of the people he writes about in "American Beach", have even noticed the danger.

Highly recommended.

PS. I read the hardcover book, which has the subtitle "A Saga of Race, Wealth, and Memory". The paperback edition has the subtitle "How Progress Robbed a Black Town--And Nation--Of History, Wealth, and Power". I'm guessing both subtitles were dreamed up by the publishers' marketing departments in attempts to sell the book to people who want to read about American race conflicts. Shame on them.