The House of Joshua: Meditations on Family and Place

Psychologist Fullilove's poetic family reminiscences form the core of her inquiry into the critical role of place and family in human psychology. She deftly draws on myths and folktales and on medical, sociological, cultural and religious insights to support her conclusion that political and economic displacement will be a central problem of the 21st century. Fullilove begins her consistently original and provocative study with a discussion of her father's hopes for inner-city ghetto communities. The first black paid organizer for the United Electric, Radio and Machine Workers Union of America, and blacklisted in the McCarthy era, he believed that by ""embracing"" the places assigned to them by ""power relations,"" oppressed populations could create a consciousness of community that would supersede the ghettos' intended purpose. In 1950, when Fullilove was born, her white mother ""began her life as Persephone,"" living 51 weeks in Orange, N.J., with her black husband, and returning alone to her parents' all-white world in Ohio for one week of the year. In 1974, enthusiastic and idealistic, Fullilove entered Columbia Medical School and began the process of finding her place there, of connecting being a doctor to the business of hospitals that routinely put their growth ahead of the needs of surrounding neighborhoods. Her own medical credo includes belief in ""the sanctity of the human spirit,"" and that ""the business of medicine cannot snuff out the deeper magic of doctoring."" In recalling her teenage daughter's summers at camp, Fullilove shows their joined yet individual discoveries about the ""need to nourish the spirit that keeps the body, the first place in which we live, moving."" This insight into the inner places that define us illustrates the complexity of Fullilove's outlook, despite its seeming simplicity. (Mar.)