The Other Paris - Luc Sante

A history of Paris over the past few hundred years, though mostly focused on the 19th and early 20th centuries, because this period has much richer information sources.  The book looks at various aspects of the city (Ghosts, Zone, Canaille, Le Business) in each chapter, with an historical view of that aspect.  Very much a history of the people - which for most of this period implies poor people.  What I see underlined in this book is the fact that so much of what we consider picturesque or essential to our view of "Paris" is based on poverty and misery.  The idealized street life is in part a life of poor people with no other place to be, except a miserable hole to sleep in.   Or trying to cobble together some kind of sustenance scrambling after opportunities in the street.  There is some kind of dissonance between this idealized view of free, wide open Paris (or New York) and the poverty and misery that underlies it.  Free and wide open because so many of the inhabitants have nothing to lose and nothing to look forward to?  No future?
On the other hand, you can see how buckled down, narrow and safe life has become as western societies have become wealthier across the board, and have accumulated more things that can be lost. There has been some kind of taming of humanity, a hollowing out in some way, a domestication.  In a sense we have become farm animals - safe, secure but oh so dull.  Trade it for uncertainty, instability but ever so much excitement and stimulation?  Hmmm.  No society has made this reverse choice yet. This is what is happening in Istanbul right now actually.  As the middle class grows, the society becomes more enclosed and more homogeneous.
Hard choices.

This book also underlines how Vanishing New York by J. Moss is a bit naive in its complaint.  There is still a whiff of the white middle class tourist on a slumming run (though a small whiff, as the author has his reasons for searching out the freedom and openness of New York City).

I suppose, in a sense, there  are two types of people in this swirling mass of humanity that gave New York and Paris their character and flavour.  One, the people who are genuinely different somehow, who don't fit in - for them, the jumble and mishmash of the city represents some kind of freedom to be.  The other type are the poor and miserable for whatever reason - drugs, lack of education, generational poverty, psychological problems.  They live on the margins, not by choice, but by necessity, or through inevitability.  These are the people who are ignored when you romanticize this older time period.

The one thing that is radically different though, is the way rich and poor mixed in Paris - at the theatre, in the street, in cafes and bals.  This does not happen in Toronto (or New York any more) by the sound of things.  Probably not in Paris either, as lower income people are pushed further and further out from the centre.

This book also touches on art and its role in gentrification.  This may have actually started in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century.  Before then, artists were in the orbit of the rich and the wealthy (theory) but when art moved away from representation and tradition, (and buyers) artists ended up in the poorer areas like Montmartre.  As the artists get discovered (and also establish centres in cafes and restaurants), their milieu gets discovered, and seems so much more exciting than the run-of-the-mill.  This draws money, draws moneyed people, and we go on from there.

Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul - Jeremiah Moss

Brilliant look at gentrification - causes, specifics, effects.  Told through the changes that have happened in different New York neighbourhoods.  He looks at specific longtime businesses, at the politics and policy behind changes, at the effects on lower income families, at the disaster that sometimes follows high rent gentrification.  He also adds comments and analysis from the literature on gentrification and its effects - these are good sources for followup.  There is also some discussion of the social changes that are behind this gentrification and suburbanization of the city.
I like his view of the historical role and importance of cities - essentially an environment of freedom and tolerance.
Reading this book brings back a lot of memories from my trips to New York in the late 70s.  Also, early days in Toronto.  The process of urban change has been similar in Toronto, though not so extreme or so rapid.  But the result, the "same-ification", the whitewashing, the commodification has been the same.
Interesting to read someone writing about the same questions and complaints I have had about Toronto over the past few years.  A subject to pursue.

The real question though, is what next?  If the city has lost its place and role as a home for diversity and difference, where do you go?  Scattered and down your own rabbit hole?

All That is Man - David Szalay

Collection of short stories about men at different points in time in their life.  Different men in each story.  I think he does a good job of capturing at least the general or typical themes at each age in different situations - dreams gone bad, loss of soul, success, failure.  Of course, I found the ones about older men the most interesting, and I can say he definitely hits some of the states and preoccupations right on.
Well-written.  Expresses the undercurrents without hitting you over the head.

The Barbarians - Peter Bogucki

A history of Europeans from the late Stone Age through to the end of the Roman period.  In the Roman stage, the "barbarians" refers largely to the Germanic and Celtic speaking groups outside the Roman Empire.  This book is essentially a reworking of the image of "the barbarian" as inherited from roman authors of antiquity.
The Barbarians were farming peoples living in small villages or settlements.  Farmers, not warriors really.  They operated complex trade networks with goods of all types moving great distances, both luxury goods and goods for manufacturing and metal work.  People also moved great distances, especially during the Bronze age, when there seems to have been a fair bit of cultural and linguistic unity across Europe, at least for some groups.
Bogucki also offers a more nuanced account of the relationship between Rome and the groups beyond its borders.  Thought there was some raiding and mayhem, the relationship by and large was one of trade and economic advantage to both sides.  The borders were porous both for traders and Germanic speaking mercenaries seeking employment.
The book also calls into question the movement of large groups of people (like the Visigoths) immediately after the fall of the Roman Empire in the west.  Apparently there is no archaeological evidence for a period of mayhem and cultural/artifact shift.  Maybe it was bands of warriors moving about looking for good places to set up as small independent kingdoms - opportunities for "protection rackets"  ie.  You feed me, house me, provide me with booze, and I'll protect you from others (and myself).
This lack of big shifts could also explain what I have read elsewhere ie. that the Dark Age wasn't really so dark.  It marked a continuation of Barbarian Iron Age culture, with small villages and towns, complex trade networks and a farming economy.  (Just the Roman thing disappeared:  certain luxury goods, and large towns - which Germanic tribes has never really been interested in.)

Overall, an interesting different take on an interesting, creative ( though illiterate) culture in an interesting era of change.

My European Family: the first 54,000 years - Karin Bojs

Set as a personal genealogy explored through a DNA history of Europe from the Neolithic period.  (The personal setting doesn't sit so well with the scientific basis, in my mind anyway.  Would have been better as a straight out popular science book.)
Brings up a number of interesting points about European history and also about archaeology as a discipline.
First, DNA evidence seems to indicate that farming was carried into the whole of Europe by immigrants from modern day Syria and Turkey ie.  the place where farming seems to have originated.  Early farmers have radically different DNA from the local hunters and gatherers in the period where farming first moved into areas in Europe.  Later, the groups seem to have mixed as the hunters moved into the farming communities.

Many people carry a small amount of Neanderthal DNA, so Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon people mated in some way.  The fact that so many carry a small part of this DNA would indicate that the early mixed individuals had a better survival rate than those without the Neanderthal DNA.  Perhaps some adaptation to cold climates, as the Neanderthals had been living in this kind of environment for millennia.

Every living human being's mitochondrial DNA comes from a single female way back in history! Apparently, at some point we almost died out as a species?

There were several waves of immigration into Europe from Africa, but only two waves seemed to have been able to survive in the long run, the Neanderthal and the Cro-Magnon.

Europe's population was formed by essentially three waves of immigration - two from Africa, and a last one from Central Asia during the Iron Age.

DNA analysis has upset a lot of theories about social development and migration that have been developed over the years.  Many older archaeologists couldn't accept the validity of DNA-based information as it blew their pet theories and their careers out of the water.  So much for disinterested science.  Some also seem to have objected to the DNA-based conclusions on essentially racist grounds. (There is no such thing as 'disinterested' thinking....)

Worth reading for the nice summary of current DNA research in archaeology.

The High Mountains of Portugal - Yann Martel

A novel built around three linked stories and characters, with each story unfolding in a different time.  The first and the last sections I found interesting to read, but the middle one dragged a bit as it was mostly reported conversation until the last bit.
Martel seems to see animals as representing some form of state of grace or innocence from which we have fallen.  He seems to circle around the biblical notion of animals and people as somehow qualitatively different, with people superior.  There are hints of seeing technology and the modern complex, bureaucratic society also as responsible for leading us from this state of grace.  He refers repeatedly to a quote along the lines of, "We are not fallen angels, we have come up from the apes."
The last section, where the main character lives with a chimpanzee in a remote Portuguese village, exploring the countryside, is quite beautiful.

Mama Leone - Miljenko Jergovic

Another collection of short stories by Jergovic - kind of a series of collections within a collection.  Most of the stories are about his childhood and the twisted relations and strange random events around him.  Near the end, some of the stories deal with the period just before the war became really serious.  I didn't find the stories about childhood so interesting - somehow they all seemed a bit too much the same.  The emotions and relations explored are different, but the background against which this happens doesn't vary as much.