Books
Weve Lost
From an NPR contributor and investigative journalist, a striking debut novel that chronicles the first twenty-four hours after a mass burglary in a suburban Chicago neighborhood and the suspicions, secrets, and prejudices that surface in its wake.
Nestled on the edge of Chicago’s gritty west side, Oak Park is a suburb in flux. To the east, theaters and shops frame posh homes and buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. To the west lies a neighborhood still reeling from urban decline. Although the community’s Diversity Assurance program has curbed Chicago’s destructive racial housing practices over the past few decades, cultural integration has been tenuous at best.
In the center of the community sits Ilios Lane, a pristine cul-de-sac dotted with quiet homes that bridge Oak Park’s extremes of wealth and poverty. On the first warm day in April, as Mary Elizabeth McPherson, a lifelong resident of Ilios Lane plays hooky from high school, a series of home invasions rock her neighborhood. Thrust into an uneasy alliance with the neighbors around them, the residents of Ilios Lane must take stock of the world they believed they lived in;and the world many of them were attempting to create.
Incisive and panoramic, What We’ve Lost Is Nothing weaves together an impressive cast of characters, whose lives collide in the wake of disaster. In this powerful fiction debut, Rachel Louise Snyder sheds light on the gray area where ideals confront reality.
She ran past crumbling brownstones, large brick apartment buildings with busted windows and broken bottles sprinkled across the entryways. There were dirt lawns, no flowers, no children on the sidewalks pushing themselves on wobbly scooters. Through a few windows she could make out the flashes of television sets as she passed, she could hear the bass thumping of rap and hip hop. She tripped in a pothole, landed hard on her foot, righted herself. The boys shook with laughter. She ran past an abandoned brick building with multi-colored asphalt shingles. She slipped on a flattened paper sack from McDonald’s. Chain link fences waist high ran along the sidewalk in front of nearly every house. But she heard no human sounds, save for the boys following her, collapsing with laughter. She could feel her leg muscles starting to vibrate from the effort, feel her lungs straining with each breath. Such thirst she had! How much longer can I run? She had to extricate herself. Go west. Surely Michael would be worried. Mary Elizabeth would be home from school. Was she closer to Oak Park in the west, or the Loop to the east? Garfield Park. There was a botanical garden there. If she could just get there, someone would let her use the phone. Let her sit down. Offer her some water.
How can I be lost in a grid, she thought. How can I be lost so close to home?
Fugitive Denim
In the business of making and selling clothes, “Made In” labels do precious little to convey the constellation of treaties, countries and people at work in the assembly of a simple pair of jeans. In Fugitive Denim journalist Rachel Louise Snyder reports from the far reaches of this multi-billion dollar industry in search of the real people who make your clothes. In Azerbaijan she meets Mehman, a cotton classer, Ganira, a cotton picker, and Vasif, a cotton gin owner. A trip to Italy brings her the denim designers Pascal and Ariana. The factories of Cambodia produce Nat and Ry, women from the countryside who now live in the city of Phnom Penh. In New York we find Rogan and Scott, business partners who eventually team up with Bono and his wife to launch the Edun clothing line. Throughout the book, Snyder reveals the often obscure links between people from wildly different cultures and personal situations. At the same time, she investigates the manufacturing process itself, considering the feasibility of organic cotton, analyzing the environmental effects of dyes and exploring the regulations that govern factories. In a disarming and humorous voice, she ponders questions of equity, sweatshops and corporate social responsibility through narratives of individual people, making an often academic subject accessible and compelling. Neither polemic nor prescription, Fugitive Denim captures what it means to be at work in the world in the twenty-first century.
Excerpt
“Snyder must be a good listener. Her interest is in the distant voices and still lives of those who are, as one might say, in jeans… she succeeds admirably in animating the lives and the voices.” Alex Danchev, Times Literary Supplement
“A fascinating chronicle of the $55-billion-a-year global denim industry. . . .” –David Futrelle, Los Angeles Times
“A thoughtful, ultimately hopeful look at how our choices about something as mundane as jeans can alter the lives of people 10,000 miles away.”—Fast Company
“Contains a number of surprises about the most ubiquitous of clothes. . . Ultimately Snyder gets readers to think about the real costs of clothing, and its likely they won't look at $30 or $200 jeans the same way again.”—Kathryn Masterson, Chicago Tribune
“Smart and ambitious… Snyder’s investigation is an essential read for those curious about fashion or the globe-spanning business that produces their clothes.” –Publishers Weekly
“In this accessible and lively book, she uses the jeans industry to examine issues of agriculture, free trade, environmental safety and workers’ lives.” – Elsa Dixler, New York Times
“When Rachel Louise Snyder looks at a pair of jeans, she sees faces and ghosts…From start to finish, Snyder is less interested in parsing textile quotas than in portraying the lives of the cotton carders, gin operators and clothes designers she meets… I’ll never view my Levi’s quite the same way again.” –James Pressley, Bloomberg News
“…next time you buy Seven for All Mankind jeans, you'll know there's more of mankind involved in those pants, you might have imagined.” – Billy Heller, New York Post
“…Snyder is a fine reporter who, uncommonly, does her best listening when her interviewees go off-topic and talk about anything but the product. (She gives great asides.)… No one else could have written anything like her fresh report on an arbitration council hearing a dispute between Khmer union leaders and Chinese management – they didn’t speak the same language, and, moreover, misheard each other’s decibellage; or her melancholy synopsis of the Cambodian minister of commerce and garment manufacturer’s association heads expending $350,000 in Washington to lobby for five minutes’ attention from President Bush, which they didn’t get… It all matters.” – Veronica Horwell, New Statesman
“Snyder attempts to carve out a third path between the overly consumerist and the loftily distant – one that ultimately will have more relevance to consumers’ relationship to fashion in the future.” –Hadley Freeman, Guardian (UK)
“A rare book on [globalization] that is neither boring nor preachy but a wise tale of what global trade really means.” –Elizabeth Becker, author of When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge
“There are people’s stories woven into each pair of blue jeans, and Rachel Louise Snyder illuminates these stories with a reporter’s eye and a human heart.” –Pietra Rivoli, author of The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy
“…[Snyder] seeks to give consumers a different view of the impact the world’s most popular fabric has on our daily lives..” Ross Tucker, Women’s Wear Daily