The best-selling look at how American cities can promote racial equity, end redlining, and reverse the damaging health- and wealth-related effects of segregation. The devastation of the war - the death, the hunger, the destruction of the city, the freezing cold of winter with no heat, and more - plays out on these pages. I also appreciate the really concrete suggestions of the author for overcoming the “segrenomics” currently affecting most of the United States’ urban areas. Cut off from the outside world and at the mercy of snipers and enemy shelling, food shortages, lack of power and fresh water turn a once civilised thriving city into a virtual wasteland. I was interested in the subject matter but this feels superficial in treatment and with no subtlety or nuance or additional historical insight, or any sense of knowledge beyond that which anyone outside of the former Yugoslavia could have read in the newspapers.

Among other subjects, Zora loves to paint bridges and I thought often about those bridges as a metaphor for human connection and in terms of physical escape or entrapment. But when the unrest intensifies and all avenues to leave are gradually shut down, she is trapped, alone but for her neighbors and students, deriving comfort and support from one another. The world gasped in April 2015 as Baltimore erupted and Black Lives Matter activists, incensed by Freddie Gray's brutal death in police custody, shut down highways and marched on city streets.It's a springboard, too, into thinking about how to re-envision all kinds of things about the world, from the microcosm of the neighborhood to the university, for example, and then to our system of government as a whole. In the spring of 1992, fifty-five year old Zora can’t imagine that the Siege of Sarajevo will last long. While we see and experience everything though Zora’s perspective, we also get a sense of the community—her neighbours particularly who turn into a source of much needed comfort and support for each other during the ordeal—while each also deals with their own problems. Because I read the audiobook edition I wasn't able to read the Author's Note, but I found this article that explains how the novel relates to the author's family.

Initially we see her painting its bridges and landscapes—and later the destruction and fires that take over the city. He identifies forces that have resulted in "constant battering" of Black neighborhoods, weathering them over time and causing destruction. I can think of no higher praise for Black Butterfly than to say it put me in mind of Race Matters by Dr Cornel West. The pages turned quickly and I was reminded of Girl at War, one of my absolute favourites, as well as The Pianist. This book is a collection of memories and experiences Drake lived after the death of one of his brothers.This was a wonderful though heart-breaking book which kept me reading all through, and one which I highly recommend. Brown is a straight shooter and paints a clear picture of how Baltimore's Black Butterfly came to be and the current forces still perpetuating harm. To quote from John Buchan’s The Power-House, ‘You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. The siege of Sarajevo is told through the eyes of Serbian artist, Zora Kocovic,as she witnesses her city crumble from the shelling of snipers in the mountains surrounding Sarajevo. I wasn’t much familiar with the details of these events except for a skeletal knowledge of the war having taken place.

Zora is a 55 year old artist who teaches art at college and loves to paint bridges and nature scenes in her spare time. All but one city council member voted for the bill…Even after a superbly written equity assessment, the Baltimore City Council failed to block a discriminatory tax credit bill and ensure racial and spatial equity would be implemented in the city’s tax policy.This article about a novel of the 2000s with a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender theme is a stub.

Beautifully written and hauntingly evocative, Black Butterflies distils into a single consciousness a nation’s violent trauma and an artist’s sense of hope.Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages. The residents of Zora’s apartment building stuck together and supported each other revealing their resilience and love for their community as they painted, sang and watched out for one another. Brown’s The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America offers such social awareness. It details a process to learn both about spatial inequity and to implement the next steps toward the remediation of historical trauma. He also provides a glossary of terms used throughout the book which includes spatial racism, segrenomics and the White L (the predominantly White area of Baltimore that runs along the Charles Street corridor to the Inner Harbor then east to Fells Point.