Russ Rymer's American Beach
Gitlin, Todd
Florida Fantasy Todd Gitlin AMERICAN BEACH: How PROGRESS ROBBED A BLACK TOWN—AND NATION— OF HISTORY, WEALTH, AND POWER by Russ Rymer HarperCollins, 1998 337 pp. $25 cloth $14 paper...
...It was not written by a name author, although Rymer has written for many name magazines, and his first book, Genie: A Scientific Tragedy, was also well reviewed...
...ERAZIM KoHAK, The Green Halo: A Bird's Eye View of Ecological Ethics...
...Todd Gitlin's most recent book is Sacrifice, a novel...
...Reissue of Skeptical Sociology, with a new introduction by the author...
...CYNTHIA Fucus EPSTEIN, Caroll Seron, Bonnie Oglensky, and Robert Sauté, The Part-Time Paradox: Time Norms, Professional Life, Family and Gender...
...RECENT AND FORTHCOMING BOOKS BY DISSENT EDITORS JOANNE BARKAN, The Riddle of Lost Lake...
...Above all, this is the story of the free soul and activist MaVyne Betsch, a wild-haired Cordelia loose on the heath of generational betrayal, standing forth not only as a distinct person but as a reproach to a contemporary black culture that mirrors the dominant obsessions of money-grubbling and aquisition...
...He is reporter, storyteller, investigator, and essayist as required, all with the purpose of demonstrating the many ways in which American Beach connects to the nation...
...The mystery of the turn in her life haunts the book, as the demise of Jacksonville's once formidable black business community haunts the era of (partial) integration...
...Far from being marginal, "left behind," an exception to the rule, American Beach developed into an enclave within a relentless commercial culture...
...Early on his book, Rymer states straight-out what is at stake hers: "the old undiminished question, the line between money and what money cannot buy...
...TODD GITLIN, Sacrifice...
...The book has just emerged in paperback, however, and deserves to be read in several ways at once—as a novelistic narrative, a revelation of continuing American wounds, and a formidable hypothesis about the nature of American reality...
...He proceeds to reconstruct the history of the Afro-American Life Insurance Company, which thrived under segregated conditions, built American Beach as a resort refuge for blacks, and declined partly because the Lewis dynasty decomposed but partly because the end of segregation freed white-owned insurance companies to compete for black customers while the Afro-American was not able to reciprocate...
...It did not come stamped with a thesis ready-made to be transmitted via sound bites into the airlock where Imus, Winfrey, and other impresarios escort hot cultural products into media daylight...
...Neither despite MaVynee's gripping, singular story, nor because of it, this book is a memorable saga of the losses imposed by the relentless onslaught of progress American style, and of some fights against it...
...TODD GITLIN, Inside Prime Time...
...But she is never reduced to a poster girl for a social analysis...
...She also turns out to be the older sister of one of the most accomplished women of her generation, Johnnetta Cole, the president of Atlanta's Spelman College...
...R YMER'S METHOD is as various as its subject—subjects, really—deserve...
...AGNS HELLER, A Theory of Modernity...
...American Beach was published in November 1998 by a commercial publisher—that is to say, it was let loose into an indifferent world behind a whirlwind called Monica Does Bill, so that, while well reviewed, it was not an Event...
...Columbia University Press, 2000...
...Before he is done, Rymer has taken us to the utterly different but also de-liberately founded Florida town, Disney's Celebration, and found the intersection of American beach and Jacksonville's Zora Neale Hurston...
...After a brief prologue introducing the reader to MaVynee Betsch and the book's themes, Rymer takes us into the town's recent atmosphere with sixty-five pages of a piercing story of a local police homicide, an all-too-familiar tragedy of racial oppression, but also showing its many-sidedness...
...Press, 2000...
...American Beach was full of the strangeness and pain of American life, and it was not averse to significant ideas and it was splendidly written, but it did not buzz...
...Blackwell, 1999...
...DAVID BENSMAN, Graduates of a Learning Community: Reflections on the Central Park East Elementary School...
...Rymer persuasively suggests that this settlement not far from Jacksonville, founded in the 1930s as a resort for blacks and now decaying, encroached upon by luxury hotels and golf courses, is "America distilled into something strong and clear," a microcosm for the unending saga of the enslavement of Africans in America, and a fit place to inspect the relationships of the poor to the rich, the losers to the winners, in an America that thinks "you're history" means "you're over and done with...
...She reminds us of the strangeness of life, of the irreducible gap between personal life and social forces, even as social forces remain the crucible of personal life...
...DENNIS WRONG, The Oversocialized Conception of Man...
...Open Court Press,1999...
...University of California...
...In the course of relating a family saga with plot twists worthy of Raymond Chandler, Rymer also relates social history drawing on E. Franklin Frazier's Black Bourgeoisie, who would have recognized the story of descent from the grandeur of Lewis's bootstrap operation to the subsequent rise of tricksters "who saw the ideal of honorable enterprise as a public relations front for an American economic system that was in truth a game without rules, a scam that deserved to be scammed and taken for whateverit was worth and not something to be trusted or patiently courted with integrity and thrift...
...A new edition, with a new introduction by the author...
...Metropolitan/Henry Holt, 1999...
...It was full of finely drawn characters, including police, tough guys, old women, businessmen, a college president, and most remarkably the central character, a woman with no fixed domicile who has taken a vow of poverty, a "six-foot-tall, sixtyish black woman dressed in flip-flops and layers of felt, with eighteen-inch fingernails and a five-foot fall of hair festooned with political buttons, trained down her back, carried in a ball at her waist, and coifed into a foot-high cock's comb atop her head," who despite her remarkable appearance had not been featured on Oprah or Jerry Springer's show...
...Lyrick Publishing, 2000...
...And the book did not, in the contemporary manner, Happen...
...She is not a walking paragraph from anyone's grand theory...
...This is memorable woman knows a lot of scores...
...there is no really solution to the riddle of the transformation into Beach Lady...
...Farrar Straus Giroux, 2000...
...Teachers College Press, 2000...
...GEORGE PACKER, Blood of the Liberals...
...It investigated wrongs, but it was not investigative...
...An outline of the book's contents would no more convey its sinuousness than would an outline of one of Faulkner's novels...
...25 cloth $14 paper Russ RYMER has written a powerful book of what C. Wright Mills called "socio logical poetry," escorting the reader into a world that is unknown to most everyone who doesn't live there, the historically black Florida Atlantic Coast island community of American Beach...
...Touchstone Press, 1999...
...The story is deeply radical-it goes to the root...
...Florida Fantasy Todd Gitlin AMERICAN BEACH: How PROGRESS ROBBED A BLACK TOWN—AND NATION— OF HISTORY, WEALTH, AND POWER by Russ Rymer HarperCollins, 1998 337 pp...
...Christened "Marvyne" but having subtracted the "R" in her name when Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States, "Beach Lady" turns out to have graduated from Oberlin College, then to have gone to Europe and become renowned for her soprano performances in Germany in the late 1950s and early 1960s, before she unaccountably quit singing, returned to Florida, and gave away all her money...
...Verso, 1999...
...Routledge, 1999...
...DAVID BENSMAN, Building Family School Partnerships in a South Bronx Classroom, NCREST Press, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1999...
...It turns out that Rymer's Virgil, his guide to the saga of American Beach, MaVynee Betsch, "Beach Lady," as she is known, is the great-granddaughter of Abraham Lincoln Lewis, born in 1865, the patriarch and founder (in 1901) of Florida's first life insurance company, and the developer of American Beach as a resort for African Americans during the Jim Crow era...
...She wasn't Happening...
...MARSHALL BERMAN, Adventures in Marxism...
...ROBERT HEILBRONER, The Worldly Philosophers (7th revised edition...
...It was deeply concerned with the workings of American society, it was, in fact, a textbook case of the sociological imagination—which (as Mills defined it) sees private troubles as public issues—but it was not an issues book, it was rather a book about American reality, "A Saga of Race, Wealth, and Memory," in the words of the original subtitle, that, along the way, brought to life issues of land use, racial injustice, police malfeasance, and black culture...
...The story of the twenty-first century will be the story of that line, the line between money and value...
...It turns out, in one of many turns of the screw, that "the modern lily-white 'plantations' [resorts] that MaVynee Betsch so detests have their historical provenance in her great-grandfather's invention of a corporatesponsored vacation enclave shut off from a hostile exterior world...
Vol. 47 • January 2000 • No. 1
