Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship
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Books:
4-stars-and-a-half
(83)
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| 0871404850
| 9780871404855
| 0871404850
| 4.25
| 7,058
| Mar 01, 2013
| Oct 06, 2014
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really liked it
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This turned out to be excellent. A readable, engaging and well-researched work of 19th century British social history, by an author who also engages i
This turned out to be excellent. A readable, engaging and well-researched work of 19th century British social history, by an author who also engages in extensive reenactment and so has tried these things (the clothes, the grooming, the food, the work) herself, reporting back with some fascinating findings. The organization did cause me doubt early on: it’s loosely structured by time of day (beginning with getting up and talking about heating of homes, moving on to dressing where we talk about clothes, then going to work and talking about transportation and workplace safety...), which means the entire first 150 pages are devoting to clothing, grooming and hygiene. While Goodman’s in-depth research and personal experiments keep these sections alive, they nonetheless exceeded my interest and made me wonder how anyone not a historical novelist or reenactor could have stuck with it! Happily, when we finally arrive at breakfast, Goodman pivots to discussing the extensive hunger in the Victorian world, and from there on out it’s a broader social history. Kept my attention and I learned a lot, despite having read a decent amount about the period already. Some interesting tidbits: - Victorian homes just weren’t heated much—even by the wealthy, unless someone was sick. Workplaces and schools weren’t either, explaining stories like ink freezing in inkwells. - This is perhaps related to the Victorian obsession with ventilation. They not only believed smelly miasmas caused disease, they also thought closed rooms would give you carbon dioxide poisoning—so you’d better sleep with those windows open, even in winter. This fascinates me—first because, amusingly, I can’t actually explain why we don’t all asphyxiate at night, and second because it’s such a great example of how societies adopt bugbears and refuse to be reasoned out of them (a modern American equivalent might be obsessive supervision of children due to overwrought kidnapping fears. Victorian reformers thought about poor families sleeping together in closed rooms the way some people today think about children playing unsupervised). - At any rate, based on the author’s experience, heavy Victorian clothing and carb-heavy, relatively unseasoned Victorian food both make a lot more sense when you’re doing manual labor in a mostly-unheated home during an English winter. And you can in fact do said manual labor in a corset as long as you don’t lace it too tightly, as fashionable young women were wont to do. - Most Victorians, however did not have enough food, and for most people it was monotonous (southern English laborers might eat nothing but bread and beer day after day. The temperance movement then got the beer replaced with tea, which lacks beer’s nutritional value). Workhouse and prison rations were actually below the necessary for survival, causing people to slowly waste away. But even children from upper-class families didn’t always get enough, as hunger was thought to improve moral character, especially in girls. - Food adulteration was a common problem, especially among staples bought by the poor: for instance, milk might be watered down and colored with chalk. Between toxic adulterants and completely unbalanced diets (including for babies) it’s hard to see how anyone survived—skeletal remains show malnutrition to be a major problem. - Medicine could be toxic or dangerous too, and this was the era of giving opium to babies to keep them quiet. Goodman posits that a baby of the era was best off born to an lower-middle-class or upper-working-class family: well-off enough that the mother didn’t have to work, but not so wealthy that she was delegating child care (likely to a poor young girl), and with enough money for food but not enough to indulge much in medications. - The period was also the height of non-home-based child labor, as children as young as 7 or 8 could be employed full-time in factories or mines. It was bad enough that the Victorians did finally start to regulate this (ultimately also arriving at some regulation of adult labor too—at least by the end of the period they had Saturday afternoons). Of course, part of the problem was that all this hard labor as a child caused people’s bodies to give out early, so by the time the kids were old enough (by Victorian standards) to work, their father might be failing. - On a less depressing note, some Victorian hygiene and grooming practices are surprisingly similar to today’s (cold cream + powder = foundation, more or less), while others are surprisingly different. It actually is true that they mostly didn’t bathe—though they founded some public bathing facilities, these began mostly as laundry facilities and turned into recreational swimming pools—but they certainly washed: standing up in their bedrooms with a basin, soap and towel, washing just one part of the body at a time, was a standard morning ritual. The author recommends this as an eco-friendly way of staying clean and notes that even just dry toweling can keep body odor down surprisingly well. - Girls’ education focused more on sewing than any other single subject, but rather than dismissing this as a travesty, Goodman delves into the extraordinary knowledge and skills the average woman had in this era—even better than many professionals today. Patterns in magazines offered almost no instruction, with the assumption that their readers could look at a picture and figure it all out, as indeed they could. At any rate, this is a strong choice for those interested in social history and the day-to-day realities of a different time. My only other complaint is the lack of citations, though the author often does make her sources clear in the text. In the end, while especially recommended for the historical novelists and reenactors among you, the book has plenty to offer the average armchair historian too. A good complement to Inside the Victorian Home—that one focuses exclusively on the middle class, while this one does a strong job relating the lives of the lower classes as well. I’d love to see books of this caliber focusing on other countries too. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 26, 2024
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Jun 10, 2024
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Feb 14, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 0393351270
| 9780393351279
| 0393351270
| 4.20
| 3,054
| Jan 01, 2014
| Jun 22, 2015
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it was amazing
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Like all the best travel books, this one is written by an author who knows the country well. Elizabeth Pisani lived in Indonesia for years, as a journ
Like all the best travel books, this one is written by an author who knows the country well. Elizabeth Pisani lived in Indonesia for years, as a journalist and later as a public health worker, before spending a year traveling around the country in 2011-2012. And this book is full of fascinating places and people. You’ll also learn a lot: there’s some basics on the history, as well as explorations of various cultural practices, religion, work, political campaigning, education, and language, not to mention difficult issues like corruption, environmental degradation, and recent experiences of mass violence. It all fits very naturally into the author’s journey and the experiences of people she meets. I haven’t made a list of highlights, as Pisani’s storytelling is strong and I was equally engaged and interested throughout—and because so much of what’s in here sounds so bizarre or extreme out of context that a list of factoids would look like gawping, while the book itself places things in context and is respectful. Pisani doesn’t just zoom around, but often stays for weeks or months, participates in household work, and keeps up with people afterwards. Indonesia is a huge and diverse country, and the book ranges from the urban jungle of Jakarta to little-developed and remote islands, spending more than half its pages on the smaller islands of eastern Indonesia, while later chapters explore Sumatra, Borneo and Java. Pisani does a strong job of picking out the most compelling stories to share (we don’t see every place she visited) and letting the places and people she meets take center stage rather than overshadowing the story herself (though her Britishness and her age are clear from time to time). But she’s clearly up for just about anything, and gets to know a lot of people fairly well. I especially enjoyed her reconnection with people she’d met sometimes decades before, seeing how their lives had turned out. And the writing itself flows well, as you’d expect from an experienced journalist. I do agree with other reviewers that it’s not a book you blaze through, but one to appreciate a section at a time. For the most populous country in the world, Indonesia is not one I knew much about, and this book did a great job of putting it on my mental map. A great choice for any armchair traveler. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 10, 2023
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Dec 17, 2023
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Oct 06, 2023
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Paperback
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| 0805097627
| 9780805097627
| 0805097627
| 4.07
| 569
| Mar 11, 2014
| Nov 04, 2014
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it was amazing
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A thoughtful, incisive, courageous memoir of my favorite sort, where an author digs deep and with an open mind into big questions about painful events
A thoughtful, incisive, courageous memoir of my favorite sort, where an author digs deep and with an open mind into big questions about painful events. Toumani, an Armenian-American journalist, grew up surrounded by the fairly militant rhetoric of the Armenian diaspora around the need to gain recognition and punish Turkey for its early 20th century genocide of its Armenian population. As an adult, however, she came to question whether her community’s obsession with the genocide was healthy, and wound up spending several years in Turkey: traveling, learning the language and the politics, and exploring whether possibilities for reconciliation exist. Toumani is an excellent writer, who’s clearly engaged in a lot of in-depth, nuanced thought about these issues and presents the evolution of her own thinking—as well as the people around her—skillfully on the page. Not knowing much about Turkey, Armenia, or the history of Armenians in Turkey (most of what is now eastern Turkey was at one point part of the Armenian kingdom, and remained ethnically Armenian under the Ottoman Empire), I learned a lot from this. I was also continually impressed by Toumani’s ability to ask bold questions and face people and opinions she knew would be uncomfortable. Some of her conversations with Turkish genocide deniers (unfortunately there are a lot of these, as the Turkish government denies the genocide and has worked to erase the history of Armenians in Turkey—except as minor villains) made me uncomfortable, and I have no stake in this! Toumani’s ultimate conclusions are not starry-eyed, however. She ultimately realizes that after too long in Turkey, she’s starting to internalize the oppression of Armenians there, feeling as if she comes from a lesser group and needs to win the favor of Turks she encounters. And while she’s able to befriend some Kurdish students as well as a handful of ethnic Turks who accept that the genocide occurred, she can’t truly connect with most Turks, who (being generally gracious people) tend to treat her identity as an unfortunate fact that they will politely overlook. Still, she comes out of the experience with a far more nuanced view of a country the Armenian diaspora tends to view as evil incarnate, even to the point of mistreating Armenians who live there. Not an altogether perfect book—the section on the author’s travels to Armenia feels truncated, focused on the diaspora rather than Armenian citizens themselves, and the final conclusions feel rather abrupt—but certainly a superior one. Worth a read for anyone interested in the effects of nationalism, in group identity and historical tragedies, and in questions of historical memory itself, as well as those who simply enjoy intelligent and deeply-felt memoirs. Those who want more memoirs along this line might also be interested in Echoes from the Dead Zone (about the conflict in Cyprus) and In My Mother's Footsteps (Palestine). ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 24, 2023
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Oct 02, 2023
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Jul 07, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 0735239614
| 9780735239616
| 0735239614
| 4.10
| 10,888
| Sep 28, 2021
| Sep 28, 2021
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it was amazing
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This is an incredible book, and an incredibly bleak one. If it works for you, it is pretty much the emotional equivalent of getting dragged through br
This is an incredible book, and an incredibly bleak one. If it works for you, it is pretty much the emotional equivalent of getting dragged through broken glass. But it is very well-written, very real, full of understanding and empathy for people usually dismissed and marginalized by society—so I hope people will read it, both for understanding’s sake and just because it’s an excellent novel. There aren’t too many writers these days who can get me this invested in their characters, even worrying about what will happen to them after the book is over! The Strangers follows four Métis women living in Winnipeg, over about five years—three generations of one family, but circumstances have torn them apart so that they are now almost strangers to each other. Phoenix begins the novel in her late teens, giving birth in prison and struggling with rage and depression. Her bookish younger sister, Cedar-Sage, is in foster care, about to be sent to live with the father she’s never known and his new family. Their mother, Elsie, is on the streets, struggling with drug addiction and self-hatred. And in flashback chapters we also meet her embittered mother, Margaret, and see some of the origins of the family’s trauma. This is a character-driven story, and Vermette takes real risks with the characters; the book presents such an authentic picture of high-crisis poverty and addiction and trauma, never taking the easy way out. But you come to understand these complex people and what made them and how in better circumstances they might have been completely different. Everyone will love Cedar-Sage of course, she has this combination of admirable determination and smarts with so much vulnerability and loneliness that you just want to hug her the whole book. I felt similarly about Elsie—Elsie is a mess, she’s a bit pitiful and I wanted her to be able to do better, but it’s also so very clear how she wound up this way. She’s a sensitive person who has had an awful life, beginning with her mother’s constant rejection and contempt and then with more trauma on top of (probably stemming from) that. Her chapters reminded me of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts and its examination of how people wind up addicts. But it’s important to note—in her chapters, as in all of them—that this isn’t a hopeless book. There is warmth here, and possibility: the question is just whether it will be enough. Phoenix is a tougher character: she has also had an awful life and you can see how she wound up in prison and how she might have turned out differently, and empathize with her current lousy situation. At the same time, she clearly has a violence problem and while I wanted her to get help, I didn’t exactly want her to get out. And then there’s Margaret, who is pretty much a textbook narcissist. She is impressively awful—as in, I was impressed Vermette was willing to write a major character this awful, while still feeling authentic and frighteningly relatable. (I think I need to re-examine my own tendencies toward annoyance and resentment after reading this character. Fortunately, I don’t have kids!) She’s not quite the villain of the piece—and under different circumstances she’d also have been a better person—but she seemed to me to have a much higher level of agency and malice than the others in her ruining her own and her family’s lives. This is a companion novel to The Break, but while there is character overlap, they feel quite different: The Break has a larger cast, a much shorter timeframe, and perhaps most importantly, the extended family featured in that book is in a much better place—emotionally, relationally, financially—to handle what life throws at them. One comes away from The Break feeling that despite everything, the Traverses will probably be more or less okay, which I can’t say about the Strangers. Unusually, though this book is set later, you could read them in either order without spoilers, though you’ll certainly have a different view of some of these characters if you read The Break first. For instance, The Strangers never tells us why Phoenix is in prison ((view spoiler)[rape (hide spoiler)]), or how Elsie came to give birth to her ((view spoiler)[also rape (hide spoiler)]). And the final line lands completely differently depending on whether you recognize the speaker: (view spoiler)[if not, this is a nice optimistic moment: Cedar’s moved into her college dorm, a dorm-mate is being friendly, maybe she’s finally finding her people? But if you do, it’s an ominous note: Ziggy is one of Phoenix’s victims, and I don’t think she and Cedar can be friends, especially given Cedar wants to keep Phoenix in her life. I think Ziggy will feel betrayed when she learns of this connection. I’m worried that Cedar will wind up ostracized in her dorm and with the whole campus knowing her as “that girl whose sister raped a 13-year-old with a broken bottle” because that’s a level of awful that nobody will ever forget. (hide spoiler)] All that said, I was consistently impressed with the writing here. Though three of the four points-of-view are (wisely) told in the third person, they still each feel distinct, based in the voices of the characters. The dialogue also feels very real and true-to-life (I wanted to be annoyed by the long monologues from the prison mentor, but couldn’t because he sounds exactly like someone I know and it is adorable). The stories are compelling, both in the present and in the flashbacks, which I was always eager to read to see how this puzzle fit together. And of course the characters are three-dimensional and real; I believed in them far more than I usually do fictional people. If I have a complaint, it’s that their endings are so ambiguous. I want a third book to see what happens next! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 09, 2023
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Jul 13, 2023
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Jun 01, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 0300028849
| 9780300028843
| 0300028849
| 4.32
| 1,422
| unknown
| Sep 10, 1982
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really liked it
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4.5 stars A fascinating study of the Ming dynasty in the 16th century, focusing on individuals at the highest levels of government—something you routin 4.5 stars A fascinating study of the Ming dynasty in the 16th century, focusing on individuals at the highest levels of government—something you routinely see in European histories but which I had not previously read about China. Huang makes extensive use of government records from the time, which given the 1981 publication date and the information available online about his career in the Nationalist Army and subsequent immigration to the U.S., I assume he researched in government archives brought to Taiwan. The records were clearly extensive, including transcripts of entire conversations between the emperor and high-level officials. The book was published by an academic press, and in a sense it’s an academic work—his prose is very concise, meaning a bit on the dense side at times—but it’s free of jargon and tells the story of the era and several prominent men with sufficient interest to appeal to a general audience, provided you accept it won’t be a breezy read. Despite the title, the book is not really about the year 1587; it uses that as a jumping-off point to tell a broader story about the reign of the Wan-li emperor, and the late Ming period more generally. Several chapters focus on the emperor and his grand-secretaries (responsible for much of the business of the government, though they rarely saw him in person), as well as officials from the bureaucracy and the military. These different perspectives allow the book to explore various issues faced at the time, including those leading to the fall of the dynasty, from the functioning of the court and bureaucracy to business and monetary policy to military tactics to philosophy. Some tidbits that struck me: - So many fictional tropes about kings that have proven quite untrue in my reading about later European monarchs were in full force for the late Ming: the emperor raised in isolation from other children, rarely allowed to leave the palace, having regular formal audiences (usually at dawn) with the whole court in attendance, marrying their own subjects (often those of low rank, though their families could get promoted as a result), and being controlled by their advisers. The palace was even full of women taken as a levy as young girls from local towns, to serve the emperor and compete for his attention (most never became his mistresses however, and many later set up housekeeping with palace eunuchs). Of course this was not a novel, however, and all this rigidity resulted from the bureaucratic, ceremonial and ethical context to everything. - Speaking of barely being allowed out of the palace, the bureaucracy felt very strongly about emperors not accompanying their armies to war. A previous emperor who did so faced massive resistance, from being prevented from passing through the Great Wall by one of his own officials (he had to return to the palace and transfer the official before he could get through), to large-scale peaceful protests by the bureaucracy. - The bureaucracy itself functioned mostly as a massive HR department, meant to set a moral example. It lacked the technical expertise to really be in charge of anything and so the best it could do was choose the right people for a job. This of course held back development, combined with the fact that it was deeply steeped in the classics as a model. Criminal justice was all about the instincts and reasoning of the officials responsible for it. - Bureaucrats could submit memorials to the throne whenever they thought something was wrong, and the gutsiest thing they could do was submit papers on the moral failings of the emperor. Some were arrested or publicly beaten (sometimes to death) for this, but it was a way to make one’s name for righteousness. A truly righteous bureaucrat would also be an ascetic, living on the poverty wage of his office rather than accepting bribes, but virtually no one actually did this and one who famously did found himself ineffective, although lauded. - The army was a distinctly second-class pursuit, and was more capable of putting down peasant rebellions than engaging in proper warfare. A successful general, Ch’i Chi-kuang (given its publication date the book uses the Wade-Giles system of romanization, which sounds pedantic, but if you’re used to seeing Chinese names in pinyin you will notice the difference) made his infantry successful through tactics that made sense to peasant soldiers—including two soldiers in each formation wielding bamboo trees as blocking tactics. Keep in mind we are well into the age of gunpowder here and the same army also used cannon mounted on battle wagons. - There was no business law, further restricting development, and monetary policy was a mess: at one point the government issued paper money but refused to accept it for taxes, causing its rapid devaluation. Instead currency was silver: not coins, but chunks of silver, which would need to be weighed at every transaction. Because the government didn’t issue these, it also couldn’t control the amount of money in circulation, meaning the rich could hoard it and the poor literally not have access to currency. Predatory mortgages wound up being their only access to credit. At any rate, I ultimately found this book engaging, readable and formidably smart, although I did struggle with the subjects I usually struggle with (economics, philosophy). Certainly worth a read if you have any interest in the era, or in Chinese history generally. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 20, 2023
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Oct 02, 2023
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Mar 10, 2023
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Paperback
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| 0451464168
| 9780451464163
| 0451464168
| 3.71
| 5,521
| Mar 06, 2012
| Mar 06, 2012
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it was amazing
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4.5 stars A really impressive novel. I wouldn’t call this one fantasy or horror, although some have classified it as such, more like literary fiction w 4.5 stars A really impressive novel. I wouldn’t call this one fantasy or horror, although some have classified it as such, more like literary fiction with some maybe-fantastical-maybe-not elements mixed in. Our narrator, Imp, is writing down her memories in an attempt to decipher some disturbing things that have happened to her—early on they seem disturbing in the sense of a ghost story, though as the book progresses it is more in the sense of the ways the world can be rough. This is a fantastically written book, both in the sense that the prose is well put together and that I completely believed Imp’s voice—she sounds like the person she’s supposed to be in a way that few narrators do. Imp is also an endearing character that I felt for a lot; I loved her mix of eccentricity and naivete, the way she’s a little out of sync with the world and a little old-fashioned in terms of her interests, without apologizing for or even quite acknowledging it. Imp is also schizophrenic, and that’s written in a very sensitive and nuanced way; I think the author has said the portrayal is semi-autobiographical and I definitely believe it, because it feels far more like the memoirs I’ve read from people with severe mental illnesses than the way such characters are usually treated in fiction. There’s a section in which Imp goes off her meds, and it’s brilliantly written—lyrical and intense and rambling and out-of-touch, and very different from the rest of the book, as if several dials have been turned up—but it never felt exploitative. Imp’s illness and her generosity toward strangers both make her vulnerable, and she believably winds up in some weird and unfortunate situations, and I always wanted the best for her. That said, this book is quite unusual: it’s ambiguous and often confusing and even at the end, it’s difficult to say for sure what happened. My theory is (view spoiler)[that Eva was just a really disturbed person who manipulated Imp, and ultimately roped Imp into assisting with her suicide, and that the supernatural bits are a result of Imp’s memories getting jumbled: in the way that memories tend to do, and because of Imp’s illness, and because all of this was traumatic and she was trying to forget. But there’s definitely a reading in which Eva is both disturbed and supernatural, and probably other readings I’m not thinking of. (hide spoiler)] I don’t mind the lack of answers—I like books with room for interpretation, and it was such a fascinating ride that I don’t mind that it wasn’t all real; it all served some purpose in Imp’s walking through her memories—but it isn’t for everyone. Personally, my biggest criticism is that the two embedded short stories (particularly the first one) feel rather disconnected from the rest of the narrative and not very satisfying in themselves, though an author combining so many styles within one novel is certainly impressive. Also, a fun tidbit: two of the works of art important to the book were actually invented and then commissioned by the author! You can see them here, although both also have different versions. (Maybe don’t look up the author’s interviews though; she seems like a piece of work.) At any rate, I thought this one was pretty great—definitely worth checking out for those interested in something different in their reading. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 10, 2022
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Oct 15, 2022
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Sep 02, 2022
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Paperback
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| 0374600848
| 9780374600846
| 0374600848
| 4.12
| 11,842
| Sep 13, 2022
| Sep 13, 2022
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it was amazing
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4.5 stars A fabulous, empathetic book that tells the stories of six people dealing with mental illness, about their lives and how they understand their 4.5 stars A fabulous, empathetic book that tells the stories of six people dealing with mental illness, about their lives and how they understand their distress and the various ways the system worked or didn’t work for them. Aviv is an excellent storyteller, and though this book is short it’s very meaty—she evidently considered writing a book entirely about each of the people profiled, and packs so much in here that I can see it, without feeling that this format gave them short shrift. This book is probably the best example I’ve read of an author writing about mental illness in someone other than themselves (she does include herself, but she isn’t the focus) yet keeping the focus firmly on the person, not the illness. Illness—or distress manifested or understood as illness (it’s not as bright a line as we might believe)—is part of each story, but they’re all still individuals and the author is most interested in how they understand themselves. Some brief notes on the stories included: Ray: A successful doctor who goes into a tailspin when facing professional setback. This story is largely focused on the conflict between doctors favoring psychotherapy and those favoring medication when psychiatric medication began to take off, and Ray was right in the middle of it, as he sued a psychotherapy-only hospital for failing to cure him. But life went on and meds also failed to provide a cure-all in the end. Bapu: A well-off Indian woman treated as second-class by her in-laws (even as they all lived in her house), she took refuge in religion and ultimately took it to extremes—or perhaps suffered from schizophrenia, and made Krishna her focus? This is a fabulous chapter, exploring the ways western models of mental illness interact with very different cultures. The fledgling mental health care system in India at the time sounds incredibly traumatic, but it was also a fledgling, which perhaps accounts for the fact that outcomes for people diagnosed with schizophrenia there were better than in the developed world. Ultimately Bapu’s own remedy (devoting herself to a less all-consuming god) seems to have done her more good than anything else. Naomi: This is a wild ride of a story, an African-American woman who grew up in abject poverty, then began suffering from serious distress as a young woman, which culminated in throwing herself and her twin infant sons off a bridge in the belief that this was necessary to save them all from racism. She and one boy were rescued, but the other was not, leading to her conviction for murder. This chapter takes a hard look at poverty, intergenerational trauma, racism, and the justice system, whose definition of insanity hasn’t changed in centuries despite everything we’ve learned in the interim. Laura: A privileged young white woman who seems to have had a difficult childhood (she didn’t want to talk about it with the author, making this perhaps the weakest of the stories) and began to be heavily medicated as a young adult, until she didn’t know who she was on her own. This chapter looks at the epidemic of psychiatric medication, with people potentially being prescribed dozens of pills primarily to counter the side effects of other pills, all of it severely limiting their lives (such as killing people’s sex drives), as well as the question of when distress becomes something that should be medicated, and for how long. At what point are people, especially those with high expectations, being medicated to achieve more or simply to avoid medication withdrawal, rather than because they’re still sick? This segues into the author’s own life—she is rather bizarrely hospitalized for anorexia at age 6 (fortunately, it didn’t last), and then as an adult, winds up taking Lexapro long-term even though she isn’t depressed, to make her more productive and improve her personality. This is uncomfortable to read about, and the author is evidently uncomfortable with it too—but at the same time, she doesn’t want to be dysfunctional for her own kids in the same way her parents were dysfunctional for her (leading to the whole 6-year-old anorexia hospitalization episode) and it’s hard to argue with that. Then there’s the epilogue, focusing on a woman named Hava who was hospitalized alongside the author for anorexia. Unfortunately, for Hava this was a lifelong problem, and this section points out the way people with anorexia are often denied care by insurance despite the fact that it is the deadliest mental illness. Overall, I was riveted by the stories (and they’re told in bite-size sections, making it easy to read), and loved the way Aviv weaves together individual stories and the larger picture. The stories are thorough and insightful—everyone she profiles is exceptional, most if not all being writers who kept extensive journals, which helps paint a complete picture of their experiences. She’s thorough in putting together pictures of their lives, too, getting to know family members and contacting doctors and anyone else who will speak to her. Aviv also clearly did her big-picture research: it would be easy for a book mostly focused on the U.S. to resort to stereotypes for the chapter set in India, or for one mostly following well-off people to fail to dig in to the chapter dealing with poverty and racism. But every chapter feels fully explored, and all of them compassionate and respectful of people’s experiences and their right to define their own stories. I highly recommend this one. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 19, 2022
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Dec 22, 2022
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Aug 30, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 0060855029
| 9780060855024
| 0060855029
| 4.27
| 13,252
| Jan 01, 2001
| Apr 25, 2006
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it was amazing
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4.5 stars This is really a fantastic memoir of the author’s experiences living in Fuling, China (in Sichuan province on the Yangtze) as a Peace Corps v 4.5 stars This is really a fantastic memoir of the author’s experiences living in Fuling, China (in Sichuan province on the Yangtze) as a Peace Corps volunteer from 1996-98. He taught English literature in a local college where students from mostly poor backgrounds trained to be grade school teachers, though many wound up taking other paths. He also spent a lot of time becoming fluent in Mandarin and talking to people around town, and his experience clearly made a lasting impression, as he continued to live in and write about China for many years. As far as the book, it is insightful, engaging and well-written, bringing the reader into Hessler’s day-to-day and emotional experiences as well as providing vivid descriptions of places and people, and background research and information where helpful. I actually like Peace Corps memoirs, which feels like a confession since they get a bad rap (perhaps because a large chunk of the audience consists of people with their own Peace Corps affiliation)—or maybe I just choose them carefully; at any rate, I’ve never read a bad one. They offer a unique window into distant places, written by people who are foreigners to the place and therefore notice everything, but who are also completely immersed in the culture and tend to approach it with curiosity and open minds. Of the Peace Corps memoirs I’ve read, this is not only by far the most popular, but to me also clearly the best. Hessler is an accomplished writer and acute observer, which makes sense given his background in English literature and career in journalism. He knows how to tell a story. He offers thoughtful analysis, including of his own behavior and reactions. He’s fascinated by China, and shows respect for the culture and people without being afraid to have an opinion—while noting that he’s writing specifically about Fuling over the course of a couple of years, not attempting to generalize the entire country. He gets outside of his comfort zone: living in Fuling seems to have forced that, as foreigners simply going out on the street inevitably drew a crowd. And he’s genuinely interested in those around him. A few observations that particularly interested me: - On the “individualism vs. collectivism” question, Hessler notes that the people he knew in Fuling did indeed have strong family bonds, and older adults were given a valued role at home and had much fuller and more satisfying lives than in the U.S. People also tended to be very generous with family and friends. All this matches the stereotypes. However, the other side of the coin was lack of community feeling beyond one’s personal circle. Part of Fuling was scheduled to be flooded with the opening of the Three Gorges Dam, and even well-educated university teachers professed themselves indifferent since they didn’t live in that part of the city themselves. Car accidents drew crowds rushing to gawk, eagerly crying out “Is anyone dead?” When Hessler asked his students to write essays on “what if Robin Hood came to China?”, many had Robin Hood help someone who had been victimized in public, evidently seeing this as unusually heroic behavior. I’m really curious about this issue, how much of what Hessler saw was about scars from the Cultural Revolution and decades of repression, and how much might be (as he guessed) that individualism somehow makes it easier for people to put themselves in strangers’ shoes. - Hessler and his fellow teachers encountered a lot of anti-American propaganda, including in the textbooks they were meant to teach, and had to learn various ways of circumventing authorities (sometimes by simply not telling them about things). Much of what was in the textbooks would be unrecognizable to an American audience, even if often true from a certain point-of-view: the section about “American religion” focusing on suicide cults, for instance. Hessler found ways to disarm expectations in conversation, for instance by regularly referring to himself as a “foreign devil.” - Another aspect of American culture particularly railed against was acceptance of homosexuality. However, rejection of gay relationships seems to have gone hand-in-hand with never reading anyone as gay: physical affection between friends of the same sex in public was extremely common. When Hessler had his students stage plays, they would even cast opposite-sex couples as students of the same sex to avoid discomfort and cultural taboos. This reminded me of reading Surpassing The Love Of Men, the way acceptance or even awareness of sexual relationships can lead to taboos on platonic affection. - People can be different depending on the language they’re speaking. Hessler considered his Chinese persona, Ho Wei, practically a different person (and not a very bright one, since he didn’t speak Chinese very well). Meanwhile, he found his students actually more willing to criticize the government when speaking Chinese, the risk of being overheard evidently outweighed by their feeling that English was the language of the classroom, and therefore of orthodoxy. He was also disappointed to find out that the more dissident members of the class tended to be the losers, with the brightest and most socially adept generally in line with the Party’s expectations. - At the time of writing (this was published in 2001), China was apparently the only country in the world where the suicide rate for women outstripped that for men. The male work culture depicted here definitely seems unpleasant—featuring lots of mandatory late-night banquets mostly about getting drunk, to the point that they all know their precise ranking in the alcohol-tolerance pecking order, and those with lower tolerance are constantly bullied into drinking more than they’re comfortable with. However, unsurprisingly for a young man staying in a gender-segregated culture, Hessler’s analysis on women’s issues is uninspired. I should also note that his disdain for diversifying the syllabus, expressed early on, did sour me somewhat. Hopefully that has changed in the intervening years. And I wasn’t a huge fan of the short interstitial chapters devoted to describing a particular place or person, which felt a little too much like writing exercises for my taste. But overall, I found this really immersive, thoughtful and interesting, and as well as a just plain enjoyable read. I look forward to reading more of Hessler’s books! ...more |
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Aug 18, 2022
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Aug 25, 2022
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Aug 14, 2022
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| 1250272858
| 9781250272850
| 1250272858
| 4.26
| 4,633
| Jun 07, 2022
| Jun 07, 2022
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really liked it
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4.5 stars A riveting and humane memoir of the criminal justice system. Keri Blakinger was a star figure skater as a teenager, but also had some serious 4.5 stars A riveting and humane memoir of the criminal justice system. Keri Blakinger was a star figure skater as a teenager, but also had some serious struggles; by her senior year of high school she was living on the streets and selling sex. After a decade or so in the drug world, she was arrested for dealing and ultimately spent about a year and a half in jail and prison. What makes this memoir stand out is that Blakinger is a fabulous storyteller, bringing the reader into her experiences, and skillfully showing the daily injustices and humiliations of incarceration, the ways the system truly dehumanizes people. You never lose track of her as a person though; the first half of the book alternates chapters between her early months in jail and her younger life, and to my surprise I found myself equally invested in both sections, and always wanting to keep reading and learn what would happen next. (And I learned a lot about the figure skating world, too!) It seems like Blakinger has had a lot of trauma in her life (much of it vaguely alluded to rather than spelled out), but the book has enough texture and insight to feel grounded rather than self-pitying. And in its hopeful elements, and the everyday and sometimes humorous ways that inmates find to deal with their situations, there’s a lot of resilience here. Blakinger is more privileged than many inmates, and one of her points is that the system sets people up to fail to the extent that you need her level of privilege to be able to come through and succeed. Not the easiest read, but a fairly quick one—it covers so much that many elements are skated through pretty quickly, but Blakinger is able to pack a lot of meaning into a few words, so it never felt too fast. Absolutely worth your time if you’re at all interested in the reality of incarceration, perhaps even more so than the much more famous Orange Is the New Black. ...more |
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Sep 09, 2022
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Sep 14, 2022
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Jul 31, 2022
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| 4.25
| 1,423
| Jun 21, 2022
| Jun 21, 2022
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it was amazing
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4.5 stars A fabulous nonfiction tale of two of the author’s aunts, who had very different destinies. Jun and Hong were the elder two sisters in a wealt 4.5 stars A fabulous nonfiction tale of two of the author’s aunts, who had very different destinies. Jun and Hong were the elder two sisters in a wealthy, complicated Fuzhou family (two wives, lots of kids), fortunate enough to get good educations despite being displaced for most of their adolescence due to Japan’s WWII invasion of China. Jun studied to be a teacher, and following a job interview in Xiamen, took a fateful vacation with a friend on a nearby island. That island became the last bastion of Nationalist resistance, leaving her stranded and cut off from her family as the Communists took over the mainland. This set the course for the rest of Jun’s life, as she took a job with the military, married a high-ranking officer, raised her family on Taiwan, became a hardnosed businesswoman, and ultimately took a circuitous and demanding route home. Younger sister Hong, meanwhile, took a completely different route. Always practical, she studied to be a doctor; at first refusing to be pigeonholed into ob-gyn practice based on her sex, exposure to the rampant gynecological diseases of the impoverished—highly curable, but leading to ostracism and blighted lives if left untreated—ultimately inspired her to spearhead campaigns to treat these diseases in the countryside. Her family’s Nationalist past put some serious stumbling blocks in her way—most dramatically, during the Cultural Revolution this caused her medical license to be revoked, while she was exiled for years to a remote mountain village. In later years she seems to have retained no bitterness about that experience, focusing instead on the latest medical work to be done, genuinely believing in helping the poor and willing to accept the Party with all its failings and potential. She was even roped into a leadership role in the one-child campaign, bringing as much humanity as she could to the government’s demands. It’s an enthralling story all around, Li tells it well, and although it took me a chapter or two to get invested, I was soon very eager to learn what would happen next. The author herself is the daughter of a younger sister from the second wife, and was a bit in awe of her aunts (at the time this book went to press, one was in her mid-90s and going strong, the other only recently deceased), but she still digs deep, raises difficult issues, and writes with insight and complexity. And it’s clear they gave her a lot of material to work with. There’s a lot to this story: a lot of Chinese history encapsulated in the family’s experiences; a lot of moral and emotional complexity. I don’t think I’d ever understood older Chinese people’s willingness to go along with the party line so well as I did reading Hong’s story. It isn’t just fear or brainwashing, but a pragmatic, forward-looking attitude focused on the difference she can make in the world while leaving the rest to others. While there were a few bits where the writing might have been a little smoother, overall this is very readable and well-written, especially impressive given that the author herself learned English somewhat late. If I have any real complaint it’s that I would have loved to know more about the other siblings’ lives, but perhaps that would have made the book unwieldy or revealed more than they were willing to publicize. We do see something of them early and late in the book; the family’s reunion, of course, falls short of what Jun at least wished it to be. Ultimately, this one is a great choice for those interested in seeing history through individual human stories, or just stories of tough-minded women making their way against the odds. It can be difficult to read in places, as they lived through horrific times, but it’s an enthralling book and I’m grateful that the author and her aunts were willing to share their impressive stories. ...more |
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Jan 2023
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Jan 08, 2023
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Jul 31, 2022
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| 4.25
| 131,301
| 1974
| Oct 20, 1994
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it was amazing
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This is really brilliant. It’s a novel of ideas—but ideas that matter to everyone, about how human society should be structured and how actual human b
This is really brilliant. It’s a novel of ideas—but ideas that matter to everyone, about how human society should be structured and how actual human behavior develops in response, not just weird random stuff—written by an author who fundamentally understood people. And so the visions of different societies that we see, and the people who live in them and how they think and behave, are fully convincing, where lesser speculative works are not. And the characters are convincing too, with the sorts of nuances and contradictions real people have; and I liked and was invested in the protagonist and his journey. And Le Guin is an excellent prose stylist. Silly of me to put this off as long as I did, probably for the pulpy cover art. The Dispossessed follows an accomplished physicist, Shevek, through two separate timelines in alternating chapters. In the backstory, he lives his life in a society founded by anarchists on the moon (not Earth’s moon, but a more cultivable one): grows up, has a career, starts a family, faces famine, and is finally forced to confront the failings of his society. In the present, he’s the first person from his closed society to travel to their people’s home planet, where he finds himself in a country rich with luxury and scientific discovery as well as inequality and brutality. It’s fascinating to me how contemporary this feels, for a book almost 50 years old. The Cold War influence is clear but without feeling dated; questions of power and individualism, inequality and the role of work, how government and society should be structured, are as timely as ever. Likewise the book’s treatment of its female characters and women’s role in society is quite contemporary. And the commentary on our own governments and their decisions (as seen through their analogues on Urras) as well as our destruction of the environment (as seen through the ambassador from actual Earth) are sadly just as timely now as when they were written. Really the only dated aspect is the technology, which doesn’t seem to have advanced much beyond the 70s, but technology is such a small portion of the book as to hardly be noticeable. And in terms of the ideas, the book never feels didactic; it doesn’t take sides so much as it explores both societies, their successes and failings; it lets characters make the best possible arguments for their various viewpoints, and readers can decide for themselves. This is a book that works as a story, both plotlines are engaging and build as things come to a head, but because it is more than that, here are a few thoughts it left me with: - The central tension between the individual’s desire for self-determination, and the fact that humans are fundamentally social animals, is developed in a completely believable way. Late in the book an outsider finally calls the “anarchist” society on Anarres “nonauthoritarian communism,” which was a nice moment of validation since that’s how I had been thinking of it—as much an experiment in how true communism might look as in anarchy. Can humans ever fully eliminate power structures, and leave everyone free to make their own decisions? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth the attempt. If a large enough society genuinely tried, I suspect it would wind up looking a lot like this. - But at the same time: can Anarres only exist because of scarcity? While reading the book I pondered whether I would choose to live there, if I could—equality! community! lives not consumed by work!—but tended to come down on the side of “no,” my primary reason being the scarcity. Famines aside, the lack of housing and resulting lack of privacy and personal space would be a major problem. But perhaps that scarcity is essential to the society functioning at all: because there are no surpluses, no one can hoard; everyone is necessarily part of the communal life; everyone has to pull together to survive, providing a strong sense of purpose and community, without which people tend to turn selfish. And then social inequality in the real world is closely tied to the development of agriculture, hunter-gatherer societies being much more equal. Perhaps surpluses are destroying us, but who wants to give them up? - Also, can Anarres only exist because it’s the only society on the planet? I’m inclined to agree with the character who says this: dealing with other societies and potential conflicts seems to require a government or some sort of power structure. At any rate, this is a really fabulous book, both a solid story and excellent, insightful food for thought. My only real criticism is of a romance element that felt a bit wooden, but thankfully that early stage of the relationship is over quickly (I also have some doubts about the mathematics behind the computer-generated names, also a very minor point). This is one I would recommend widely! ...more |
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Aug 12, 2023
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Aug 19, 2023
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Jul 31, 2022
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| 0316450847
| 9780316450843
| 0316450847
| 3.59
| 13,886
| May 31, 2022
| May 31, 2022
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really liked it
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4.5 stars I loved reading this: a fun, funny, and thoughtful book about trauma, feminism and economic status, related through a support group for women 4.5 stars I loved reading this: a fun, funny, and thoughtful book about trauma, feminism and economic status, related through a support group for women who have experienced a fairy tale in the modern day. The characters come to life through pitch-perfect dialogue and detail, and the story is compelling fun but has deeper meaning too. I haven’t read anything quite like it and would love to read more by this author. Note that this is more a contemporary story with magic realism elements than a typical fantasy, so may appeal to a slightly different audience. The frame story is in the support group meetings, and watching these very different and well-realized characters bounce off each other is a blast, but each gets a section to tell her story, so I’ll discuss in order of appearance: Bernice is just out of an awful experience dating Bluebeard, and worse, she’s now being haunted by the chorus of his dead girlfriends. There’s a sense in which Bernice has to go first because she’s the dull one of the bunch—you wouldn’t be anticipating her story otherwise—but she has a dramatic tale, and turns out to be an endearing character because she is so earnest about recovery and cares about other women. I appreciate the way her story gives voice to victims often dismissed in media, like the Hooters waitress, and the recasting of Bluebeard as a tech entrepreneur with a chip on his shoulder about women is entertaining and incisive. Ruby is probably my favorite for her outsized personality: she’s a walking disaster, always two steps from homelessness due to her own trauma-related bad decisions, but she’s also hilarious and gets all the best lines. Usually in fantasy I’m annoyed by the character who can’t keep their mouth shut, but Ruby is exactly the kind of person who can’t in real life, and a support group is a place where that behavior is believable, so instead of rolling my eyes as I so often do, I loved the way she voices what we’re all thinking. Ruby’s story is Little Red Riding Hood, but the book focuses less on the details of this childhood incident—which in this telling is so clearly a metaphor for child sexual abuse that I halfway wonder if that’s what really happened, even though she literally wears the wolfskin coat everywhere and it’s the cause of half her problems. But the focus is on how the trauma has thrown her life off-course, so that as an adult she’s getting fired from customer service jobs and having terrible hookups. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a portrayal of lasting trauma that felt so real and at the same time so funny. Ashlee is another big personality, and she’s a bit of a caricature of a modern social-media-obsessed young person (being the youngest of the group at 22). She’s recently off a reality TV show, where while trying to “win” she found herself manipulated in ways that destroyed her real life. I’m not sure the comparison between reality TV as a modern fairy tale, and the violence of actual fairy tales, entirely works, but the boldness of the comparison makes it interesting and I did enjoy the behind-the-scenes viewpoint—much like the scripted show UnREAL from a contestant’s perspective. There’s definitely a comparison there between the Bluebeard women and the reality TV show women, and Ashlee makes an entertaining addition to the mix. Some good commentary here on how chasing arbitrary external measures of success is a recipe for misery (though Ashlee’s still on the way to figuring that out herself). Gretel is an interesting one, whose tale I was eager to hear because she is so closed-off, hardly participating in conversations at all. Naturally, there’s some very modern commentary on poverty in the Hansel & Gretel tale, but Adelmann also does some really interesting things with this one: examining the complications of memory, as the siblings remember their childhood experiences wildly differently—Gretel’s memories are horrific while Hansel’s are pretty benign. And health care—she’s had dental problems and issues with eating ever since. And again, this story is far more about the trauma’s lasting effects on relationships than on the events themselves. Raina, finally, is also interesting for her secrets: although I’m not sure why Adelmann hides the ball on her fairy tale, she does and so I won’t spoil it here. Raina is an endearing character because she’s genuinely mature, empathetic, and not easily rattled or upset. In her 40s, she’s the oldest of the group and a mother, and struggling with something that happened in early adulthood. Her story probably makes the least sense to me, magic realism aside (view spoiler)[I was confused about why a company that found she was doing great work wouldn’t pay or hire her, or have anyone talk to her about her work, or bring her into the common work area so that she and the others could learn from each other. They’re just going to test her to no purpose? (hide spoiler)], but it’s an interesting take on the fairy tale that provides a lot of social commentary. There’s a plotline dealing with the support group itself too, of course, with the ways the women come to support each other and with some fishy business around the facilitator (if the ground rules at the beginning seem off to you, I can only say, keep reading). The setup means that this isn’t an action-oriented story, you more or less know how it’ll turn out, but while I didn’t love everything about the ending (view spoiler)[I don’t think the women need to share their stories publicly (hide spoiler)], I did find it satisfying overall. Obviously I enjoyed this book a lot. Its commentary on issues women face in fairy tales and modern society isn’t really new, but in mixing that with a complex portrayal of trauma, and with the reality of the way economic precariousness pushes people into these situations or results from them, I found it to have plenty worthwhile to say. Plus, it’s just such compulsive, entertaining reading, the characters so perfectly and entertainingly rendered. I’m not sure how long it’ll stick with me, but I enjoyed every minute of reading it and would absolutely recommend. ...more |
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Jun 26, 2022
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Jun 27, 2022
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May 13, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 006052085X
| 9780060520854
| 006052085X
| 4.00
| 3,086
| 2001
| Jan 01, 2003
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it was amazing
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4.5 stars This is a fascinating and readable exploration of language development and change; it feels like the book equivalent of a masterfully-taught 4.5 stars This is a fascinating and readable exploration of language development and change; it feels like the book equivalent of a masterfully-taught Intro to Linguistics course, which turned out to be exactly what I was looking for. Admittedly, I’m an easy sell right now because I both find linguistics fascinating and for some reason have read very little on the subject, but if you happen to be in a similar boat this book would be an excellent choice. Some topics covered in the book: Language change over time: Human speech is ever-changing, and not just its slang. Sounds change, often with unstressed last syllables dropping off (“name” in English was once pronounced NAH-muh) and vowel sounds changing in predictable ways. Rules of grammar get extended to places they didn’t previously belong, and words that had an independent meaning become simple pieces of grammar. Sounds get rebracketed: for instance, “a nickname” was originally “an ekename,” meaning “an also-name.” And words change their meaning: “silly” for instance once meant “blessed,” then “innocent,” then “weak,” before arriving at “foolish.” Over the centuries, language gradually changes so much as to become unrecognizable: hence, Latin becoming all the Romance languages in different parts of Europe. There’s no hard line on when this happened; local speech just diverged more and more from Latin over the years. Languages vs. dialects: There is no bright line defining when a mode of speech is a different language, vs. a different dialect. Nor is there anything special about “standard” dialects, which were typically just the form of speech of the most powerful at the time they decided to standardize the language—so, “standard” English and French today are just based on the London and Paris dialects. Sometimes, political/cultural unification and shared writing systems cause what are functionally different languages to be seen as different dialects (German, Chinese, Arabic). But separate countries can cause very similar languages to diverge (the author posits that Spanish and Portuguese are really no more different than different dialects of German—though from his illustrations of comics translated into Hochdeutsch, Schwäbisch and Swiss, those are indeed different languages!). This is a wildly complex issue: speakers of one language might understand another more readily than vice-versa, while dialect continuums can mean each individual mode of speech is mutually intelligible with those closest to it, while the ones at far ends of the spectrum are not. Language mixing: All languages have mixed with others and picked up words, and much as we may feel that languages as they now exist ought to be kept “pure,” that’s against the natural order of things. English, however, is unusual in how much it has mixed: 99% of our words come from other languages (though our most basic ones do descend from Old English, including 62% of the most commonly used words). This actually makes it harder for English-speakers to learn other languages: we’ve picked up from many different places, but it leaves us without a clear sister tongue that’s easy to master in the way going from one Romance language to another is. Meanwhile, languages also pick up elements of grammar from each other, and in some places multiple languages are intertwined into one. Pidgins and creoles: Pidgins are formed when people need to communicate in a language they’ve only imperfectly learned (for instance, for trade). Creoles, on the other hand, happen when a pidgin becomes someone’s primary method of communication—this has typically happened in the context of slavery, with native speakers of many different languages needing to communicate with each other, and without the opportunity to study the dominant tongue. Creoles fill out a language with the additional grammar and vocabulary needed to communicate, and their lack of frills makes them probably closest to the original human language. Whether something is a pidgin, creole or neither also exists on a continuum. Language overgrowth: Languages that are old, or isolated, tend to develop baroque grammar and other difficulties: lots of prefixes and suffixes, consonant or vowel changes, tones, genders/classes, articles, irregular forms—all inessential to human communication. My favorite are the “evidential markers”—languages in which you, grammatically, cannot relay a fact without including information on how you learned it! Contrary to stereotype, “simple” hunter-gatherers often speak incredibly intricate languages, while languages with a long history of being learned by outside adults have often been simplified somewhat. The effect of writing: Writing “freezes” a language in place, slowing down the changes that happen in a strictly oral language. Hence, why English-speakers today can still (mostly) understand Shakespeare, while he probably wouldn’t have understood the English of 500 years before at all, and some languages have even changed their grammar dramatically within a single human lifetime. Writing also leads to “rules” of language, which from a linguistics perspective are arbitrary, even though it’s hard to strip away our preconceptions about “better” ways to speak. For instance, for all the decades of English teachers insisting that double negatives are mathematically illogical, most languages use them—including Old English itself; even in the London dialect from which our standard developed, they were optional. Language death and revitalization: Most of the world’s 6000 languages are expected to die out in the 21st century, and even the distant past is full of language death. Some languages have died due to active campaigns against them (the U.S.’s boarding school campaign to force “the Indian” out of native children; France’s zealous stamping-out of local dialects), and others because their speakers perceive more widely-spoken languages as conducive to better opportunities. As languages die, they tend to become atrophied: dying languages are usually not much written, and their speakers have fewer and fewer other people to communicate with in the language. Language preservation and revival is complicated by many practical and social factors, and Hebrew is the only wild success story so far, under fairly unique circumstances. I’ve only covered the tip of the iceberg here, and unlike my vague summary, McWhorter’s writing includes lots of great examples! The book feels like a college course unto itself, while also very readable and quite a reasonable length (the actual text of my paperback is only 303 pages). I have to chuckle a bit at the folks who didn’t like seeing examples from other languages—yes, it’s a book about language, and it includes examples from many! These are richer if you’ve studied other languages in the past, but that’s not necessary to understand the book. I do have a couple of criticisms. One, I found the evidence McWhorter offers for all of the world’s languages descending from a single source to be not particularly convincing. This isn’t a large part of the book, but he does make frequent reference to all languages as “descendants of the first language,” etc., while also pointing out in the epilogue that after 150,000 years of language change, it’s impossible to reconstruct any words in such a language. Two, he spends rather a lot of words on digressions and personal asides, comparing aspects of linguistics to biological evolution and also making reference to comics, sitcoms, musicals, his cat, his dad’s killer Monopoly strategy, etc. It’s the sort of thing that would liven up a professor’s lectures in person, but it feels slightly overdone in book form (especially without sharing his now-20-years-old pop culture interests), and the jump from formal writing to personal aside can be a little jarring. All that said, I learned so much from this book that I would absolutely recommend it—it’s one of those books I expect to shape my understanding of the topic going forward. A great choice for those interested in how languages work, how they came to be, and why they are cool! ...more |
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1
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Apr 25, 2022
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May 02, 2022
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Mar 29, 2022
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Paperback
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| 1586489429
| 9781586489427
| 1586489429
| 4.15
| 1,115
| Mar 05, 2013
| Apr 23, 2013
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it was amazing
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This is an eye-opening investigation into the adoption market, both within the U.S. and globally—and as this book shows, it is very much a market, dri
This is an eye-opening investigation into the adoption market, both within the U.S. and globally—and as this book shows, it is very much a market, driven as much by demand as supply, and often resulting in exploitation. The book focuses particularly on the evangelical adoption movement within the U.S. The adoption lobby is strong here, and I suspect I’m like most Americans in having generally imbibed a pro-adoption attitude without realizing there was a lobby—but while the book doesn’t oppose adoption per se, it shows the serious problems in the industry and why taking children away from their natural parents is usually not the best way to solve the types of problems that lead to their relinquishment. I was only vaguely aware of the popularity of adoption among evangelicals, which has been gaining steam for decades: adopting children (even by those who already have many biological kids) is seen as a way to gain favor with God, a way to convert the children, a solution to abortion, and a way for Christians to do something positive rather than just sitting back and judging others. The movement is rife with misinformation: for instance, telling congregants that there are hundreds of millions of orphans in the world whom they must save through adoption, when in reality these numbers are wildly inflated. If not invented altogether, they’re based on estimates of children who have lost at least one parent—most of whom, obviously, still have relatives to care for them. Even when it works well, there are serious issues with an adoption-first model: taking off with the children is not actually a way to help a country or community, which many adoption advocates claim they’re doing. Most children being adopted internationally are not “orphans” (which seems obvious, particularly as most adoptees are under two; that’s a short span of time for two young adults to die), but instead come from impoverished families. Indeed, in many countries, poor families will use orphanages as a sort of boarding school (free meals!) during rough financial times, with no intention of abandoning their children. The hypocrisy becomes clear when you note that international adoptions tend to cost tens of thousands of dollars, but that many of these families could be preserved with just a few hundred. An answer to the children’s problems that boils down to “rip them away from their families, communities, cultures and languages, change their names, and put them under the authority of some foreign family” will not be in the best interests of most children. But—even among families who aren’t grappling with infertility and believe their own motivations to be charitable—far fewer people would be willing to put up the funds to help families than are willing to spend thousands to get control of the children themselves. The children’s needs seem to be secondary here to those of the adoptive parents. And that’s without mentioning the worst possibilities. In “boom” adoption countries, “child finders” often make a living producing adoptable children. Uneducated parents relinquish children without understanding the situation; their own cultural understanding of adoption tends to be a more flexible “it takes a village” arrangement, and they believe the children are simply going abroad for some education before being returned to them. In one family profiled here, an Ethiopian single father sent three of his seven children—girls ranging in age from 6 to 13 (though the agency claimed they were younger)—to an agency believing it was a study abroad program. The adoptive parents (who had been falsely told that he was dying of AIDS) eventually figured it out, but seemed to believe it was too late to change things and that he was fine with the girls staying (in an interview elsewhere, the oldest girl stated that their interpreter told the family to keep the girls when the father actually asked for them to be sent home). The oldest suffered from depression, was sent to live with the adoptive grandparents, and ultimately moved out with friends; based on a Facebook post from last year, the middle girl ultimately returned to Ethiopia as a young adult, while the youngest moved in with the same family as the oldest before taking her own life at 22. Then there are the actually abusive families. There have been cases of adoptees murdered by their adoptive parents (other internationally-adopting parents seem to have identified strongly with the parents convicted in one high-profile case, which is concerning), and plenty more terrible situations that don’t rise to that level. Another family profiled here, a back-to-the-land, homeschooling Christian patriarchy bunch, had several children of their own before adopting several more from Liberia, survivors of its civil war. The kids were put to work on the family property and business rather than being educated, kept isolated on the property, and beaten and locked outside in the cold for punishment. Another dark adoption underworld involves informal “rehoming,” in which adoptive parents who’ve bitten off more than they can chew give away the children to others, including strangers found on online “adoption disruption” forums. There’s a great, though horrifying, series of articles about this practice. In the worst case scenarios this naturally leads to abuse, but even the “best” cases seem to involve overcrowded homes of families who either couldn’t formally adopt because they failed a home study, or lacked the money to do so. From a brief online search, there does not seem to have been legal action since to curb this practice. Joyce mostly focuses on international adoptions, following the boom-and-bust cycle in several countries, particularly Ethiopia and Liberia. She also travels to Rwanda—which in a hopeful sign, seems to apply a lot more individual scrutiny without the corruption found other places, though their foster care program is still in its infancy, not great for children in the meanwhile. She also examines the case of South Korea, a highly developed country that as of this book’s publication in 2013, still had a major international adoption program. (This appears to no longer be the case.) This was mostly driven by extreme stigma against unwed mothers and their children, with most mothers wanting to keep their children but feeling unable to do so when they could be denied housing and jobs as a result, see their children discriminated against at school and later in the marriage market, etc. Of course, having international adoption as a release valve meant the country didn’t have to grapple with the natural results of its changing sexual mores; single parenting can’t become normal as long as no one is doing it. The discussion of domestic U.S. adoption follows a similar trend. From 1945 to the Roe v. Wade decision in 1972, unwed women were under intense pressure to give up their children for adoption, and women placed in maternity homes were often abused, exploited or saw their children stolen from them after birth. As a result, some 20% of white women giving birth outside of marriage relinquished the babies, though many subsequently suffered from grief, depression and regret. (African-American women relinquished far less often.) These days, despite enticements to birth mothers such as open adoption, very few are interested in relinquishment—around 1% of unmarried white women and a statistically insignificant number of black women. However, among the evangelical community, many of those antiquated pressures still exist. Joyce profiles one young woman who became pregnant with her boyfriend at 19, and whose parents sent her to a small, evangelical maternity home. There, she was put under intense pressure to give up her baby, introduced to the prospective adoptive parents and guilted about disappointing them when she expressed doubts, and ultimately given misinformation about her right to change her mind. Years later, she was still fighting unsuccessfully for access to her son, whose evangelical adoptive parents went on to adopt many other children as well. What’s striking about all this is how much adoption advocates seem to want to drum up adoptable children. Joyce spends a good portion of the book interviewing these people and quoting their expressed views: birth mothers who choose to keep their children are called “selfish” and “immature,” while giving up the children to be raised by others is presented as “an act of sacrificial love.” Crisis Pregnancy Centers—most commonly known for their sleazy tactics to stop women from having abortions, such as pretending to schedule them and waiting out the clock—also push adoption. But the reality, for those who see adoption as a “middle ground” solution to abortion, is that very few women are interested. A 2010 report showed that annually, an average of 14,000 infants are relinquished for adoption, while there are 1.2 million abortions and 1.4 million women keeping their children (I assume this only counts unplanned pregnancies, as the total births in the U.S. in 2010 were 4 million.) Obviously, this book is full of eye-opening information, and a lot of food for thought! It’s a very journalistic account, by which I mean both that it’s engaging and readable, including interviews with many people, but also that it doesn’t have any “main characters”; I expected it to follow a few stories more in-depth throughout, which it does not. Instead it is organized topically, presenting the abbreviated stories of adoptees and families along with the doings of agencies and activists. Very thorough, extensively sourced, and I think quite balanced as well: Joyce clearly sees a lot of problems with adoption, particularly when it comes with a sense of entitlement to the children of the disadvantaged or a desire to “save” them only if it can be done by controlling them. But she also generally seems to give adoptive parents the benefit of the doubt and to support responsible adoption—while recognizing that the best result for most kids is to stay with their birth families, and that helping kids should generally involve supporting families. I would have liked to know a little more about outcomes in birth vs. adoptive families. Joyce notes that 6-11% of U.S. adoptions are “disrupted,” which seems to mean rehoming; obviously, some parents also pass their biological children on to other relatives or institutions (though not internet strangers, I think!), while others abuse or neglect them, so it would have been interesting to see statistics in comparison. It also would have been nice to have a chapter about foster care and adoptions from that system, which is quite different from what’s shown here. At any rate, I went into this book under the vague impression that the biggest problem in international adoption was racial insensitivity/cultural ignorance, and came out a whole lot more informed and horrified. And with a lot of new opinions (not discussed in the book, which hews too much to journalistic standards to make policy proposals): - Demand for adoptable children clearly exceeds supply, so families that already have 4+ kids, whether through birth or adoption, really shouldn’t be eligible to adopt any more unless those kids are their relatives or there’s a finding that no other homes are available to them. These “families” with 10, 15, 20 kids, most of them adopted, hardly sound like a family experience at all for the adoptees. - People who intend to raise the children in some fringe lifestyle also, it seems to me, should not be eligible unless the kids are their own relatives, already members of the group, or are able to give informed consent. - Homeschooling seriously needs to be more regulated to make sure actual learning is happening. The idea of kids unfamiliar with the country being isolated through homeschooling is particularly concerning, and it seems like teens should have a say in whether to participate. - Agencies should be required to take responsibility and find a suitable new placement if the adoptive family is unable to care for the children. Plenty of animal rescue organizations require return if you can no longer keep the pet; it’s bizarre to me that we have less protection for human children. - That said, the power these private agencies have is also horrifying: they collect the kids and choose the parents (in the case of evangelical agencies, seemingly based largely on religious ideology that may not be shared by the child or their birth family), often provide false information on both ends, and have no obligation or inclination to pick up the pieces afterwards. Government child welfare services have all kinds of problems but still seem far more suited to govern adoptions than these people. - I can no longer judge people seeking expensive fertility treatments instead of adopting. There are kids out there who need homes, yes, but there are more families seeking very young children than there are adoptable children to meet demand, and not everyone is cut out to take on a traumatized or special-needs older child. A very long review, because this is such a serious issue and was such an eye-opening read for me! Although it was published in 2013, much of what’s described here still affects people in 2022, and it’s very much worth a read. EDIT: I’m retroactively rounding this up to 5 stars. Also, I read Finding Fernanda after seeing it referenced in this book, and would recommend it as a strong follow-up with a focus on a particular human interest story. ...more |
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Feb 11, 2022
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Feb 15, 2022
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Feb 06, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 0812986946
| 9780812986945
| 0812986946
| 4.71
| 16,581
| Oct 05, 2021
| Oct 05, 2021
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it was amazing
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A fabulous book. This is a journalistic account of one family’s struggle with poverty, homelessness and associated ills, closely observed over several
A fabulous book. This is a journalistic account of one family’s struggle with poverty, homelessness and associated ills, closely observed over several years and written with thoughtfulness and insight. The author worked closely with the family, without whose collaboration such an intimate account could never have been written, but also brings perspective to the observation of their personalities and coping skills and the big picture that brought them to this point. The central figure is Dasani, the oldest daughter, who is 11 at the beginning and 19 at the end. But as her trajectory makes clear, the lives of a family are all intertwined. The book begins following Dasani and her family when they are living in appalling conditions at a homeless shelter in New York City, and follows in particular their struggles with housing and education. Dasani is bright and athletic and outgoing, and for awhile it seems like her own exceptional qualities plus the publicity from the author’s initial series of articles will send her down a very different path from her family’s. She essentially wins the lottery, getting into a free private boarding school for poor children, which has both extremely deep pockets and a seemingly deep understanding of the hurdles these kids face. But meanwhile, things go badly wrong for Dasani’s family as the parents’ limitations collide with the worst in the child protective services bureaucracy, and her siblings are put in foster care. I won’t spoil it because it’s a compelling story told with narrative flair, but their experiences make clear the pitfalls of trying to help children in need without also helping their adults, and of a child welfare model that equates poverty with neglect, as well as a great deal more. There are a lot of great poverty books out there, but this one might actually be my recommendation for a starting point. The writing is compelling and readable, with lots of dialogue (real dialogue: either the author was there or the family was recording). The story is intense, and the people in it come to life, portrayed sympathetically but with complexity. Beyond the family themselves, the author also got to know those around them (in a poignant moment, Dasani’s middle school teacher also moves into a homeless shelter upon losing her affordable housing, but doesn’t tell the students). The book doesn’t tell the reader how to think, but provides big-picture information from which we can draw conclusions. In a particularly inspired choice, Elliott traces Dasani’s predecessors, from her enslaved ancestors in North Carolina, through the great-grandfather who served in WWII and saw combat in Italy, only to be unable to take advantage back home of the benefits provided to white GIs—as a black man, no colleges would accept him, and he couldn’t get a mortgage or even a job making use of his skills as a mechanic, instead being relegated to menial work. His children grew up on the streets while he struggled to make ends meet, and the story also traces Dasani’s grandmother’s and mother’s lives, through high-crisis poverty, gang involvement, the AIDS crisis and more. This is not how these stories are usually told, and it’s striking how direct a line it is from racist policies decades ago to this family’s current situation. All that said, this isn’t just a dire book full of misery: the family bonds are strong, and there is help and support from others too, as well as moments of levity. There’s a lot that is awful in it though, and the book doesn’t cast easy blame, but leaves readers to sit with some tough questions. My only real criticism is that it’s written in the present tense—I got over it, but for me that is a technique to be gotten over rather than one that adds value. At any rate, while on it’s the long side, I found the pages to turn quickly, and this is a book I’d absolutely recommend to anyone interested in learning more about poverty in America, through the real stories of people living it. Also, for those who liked this one, below are some other books I recommend and see as its spiritual kin: all books dealing with poverty and exploring in various ways its intersections with racism, trauma, addiction, and the failings of the system, as well as family, community, education, and belonging: Narrative nonfiction: Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City Narrative + analysis: $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care The Second Chance Club: Hardship and Hope After Prison Analysis: The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America Poverty, by America Memoirs: Heavy Dog Flowers The Distance Between Us Heartland Fiction: The Strangers The Women of Brewster Place ...more |
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Oct 30, 2023
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Nov 03, 2023
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Feb 05, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 0593238109
| 9780593238103
| 0593238109
| 4.52
| 52,915
| Feb 22, 2022
| Feb 22, 2022
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really liked it
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4.5 stars This is a thoughtful, intimate and vulnerable memoir of healing from child abuse, written by an acclaimed journalist who also delves into the 4.5 stars This is a thoughtful, intimate and vulnerable memoir of healing from child abuse, written by an acclaimed journalist who also delves into the research about the effects of trauma, different types of therapies, and even an investigation of how accurate her own memories are, with an exploration of unacknowledged abuse in Asian-American immigrant communities. I love a memoir by someone who can approach her own story with curiosity and thoughtful analysis, and Foo’s candor about her own vulnerabilities and failings is especially impressive. Stephanie Foo had a rough childhood, including physical and emotional abuse from both parents, particularly her mom. In her teens, both abandoned her (though her dad continued to pay the bills on the house where she now lived alone). All this is summarized relatively briefly at the beginning of the book, the focus being on her adult life and journey toward healing. Unsurprisingly, she was a total mess as a young adult—professionally successful, but often lousy to other people—and went into therapy for that, but continued to suffer mental and ultimately physical health problems from undiagnosed (as far as she knew) complex PTSD. Finally learning her diagnosis in her early 30s spurred her to seek treatment for the depression and anxiety that continued to plague her, as well as her concerns that C-PTSD made her a burden to others. In the book, she tries out many of the therapies discussed in The Body Keeps the Score, including talk therapy, EMDR, support groups, yoga, and meditation. She also struggles to manage relationships with her family (ultimately cutting off contact with her father though maintaining some with extended family in Malaysia), but is fortunate in finding a supportive partner and being welcomed into his family. As she assures readers at the beginning, the book does have a happy ending! There’s a lot in here that’s thoughtful and fascinating, such as Foo’s exploration of her own feelings about her trauma—she finds that she actually doesn’t have a lot of feelings about it, having dissociated herself without realizing it. Her exploration of her family’s history of trauma in Malaysia, and of what was really going on in the upscale immigrant community where she grew up, is great. And mad props for her candor about her own bad behavior: for her mental health, she probably is too self-flagellating and slow to recognize how she’s improved others’ lives, but it’s one thing to be self-critical in your own head and another to publish accounts of how you at times have treated others badly. We tend to have a narrative of traumatized people as self-isolating and shy, but I think Foo’s story—of constant, desperate reaching out to others for affirmation because she’s unable to find it in herself—is far more common. I also suspect that especially with the therapy she ultimately finds, she winds up far more able to connect with others than the average person is. She clearly has a lot to give and I wound up invested in her story and her recovery. And her story is well-told, with clean prose and a forward momentum that had me reading the whole book pretty quickly. Foo is always digging deeper and sharing her findings with the reader, which makes the book a pleasure to read despite the heaviness of some of the content. My only criticisms are really just cautions. First, Foo is a progressive millennial New Yorker, and writes like one—if you don’t want intensive introspection and up-to-the-moment political correctness, this book may not be for you. Second, Foo is very privileged, and while she acknowledges her privilege, aspects of her experience shouldn’t be generalized to others and could make dealing with similar situations, with fewer resources, seem more daunting. Her addiction is workaholism, which seems pretty common among middle- and upper-class Americans and perhaps is a trauma response more often than we realize, but is also convenient to capitalism and therefore admired, and I think it’s unusual for someone with the level of trauma Foo has to manage so well—in other words, others shouldn’t be expected to live up to her example. Also, her healing comes about largely because of options she has that are unavailable to most people: quitting a job with a lousy boss who aggravates her trauma in order to freelance and focus on healing, and ultimately getting free therapy from a big-deal psychologist interested in her journalistic project. The therapy works out fantastically well for her, and hopefully books like this will lead to increased availability for everyone, but—as she documents—most people aren’t so lucky with their available options. Overall, I loved reading this and would recommend it to those seeking books about trauma. I can see it being life-changing for some, and an engaging educational opportunity for others—worth a read either way. ...more |
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Apr 20, 2022
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Apr 23, 2022
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Jan 25, 2022
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| 9781571313560
| 1571313567
| 4.53
| 132,922
| Oct 15, 2013
| Aug 11, 2015
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it was amazing
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It’s been four weeks and I still don’t feel up to reviewing this book. It’s profound, potentially worldview-shifting. It’s a wonderful mix of serious
It’s been four weeks and I still don’t feel up to reviewing this book. It’s profound, potentially worldview-shifting. It’s a wonderful mix of serious science, practical know-how, beautiful nature writing and the sort of spiritual awareness that feels vital and relevant, when the big organized religions are neither. It is mostly very gentle writing, steeped in a deep knowledge of plants from many different perspectives, and informed by the author’s own life story and her communities. Though of course there are also difficult bits, dealing with environmental degradation and climate change and the destruction of indigenous ways of life. Is it perhaps a bit long? Yes—I just didn’t mind, because I liked reading it. Are there a couple of chapters/essays I didn’t like as much? Yes to that too. But it’s the sort of important book I see myself continuing to refer back to, and one I think it would benefit almost anyone to read. I’ll go so far as to say it is good for the soul. (While recognizing that the soul is not an end in itself, and what we do in the world matters.) So we’ll call it 5 stars. ...more |
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Nov 22, 2023
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Dec 02, 2023
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Nov 23, 2021
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Paperback
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| 1250768721
| 9781250768728
| 1250768721
| 4.11
| 18,999
| Nov 16, 2021
| Nov 16, 2021
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really liked it
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4.5 stars This is a great novella, fun and thoughtful, with strong ideas and engaging characters and a good story and themes worth pondering, all wrapp 4.5 stars This is a great novella, fun and thoughtful, with strong ideas and engaging characters and a good story and themes worth pondering, all wrapped up in a bite-sized package. The rating is a bit awkward because I’ve given all the Murderbot novellas so far 4 stars, and those have been far more emotionally engaging for me, while for this book my reaction is a lot of appreciation. In the end I think genre fans should absolutely try both. Elder Race is a story told from two wildly different perspectives. For Lynesse, the reckless youngest princess of a small feudal country, it’s an epic fantasy tale of a quest to defeat a demon, with the help of a legendary sorcerer, and very much against the wishes of her mother the queen. But for the “sorcerer,” Nyr, it’s a science fiction story of an anthropologist from Earth abandoned on a far-flung planet that was once a colony, trying to figure out what to make of his life when all connection to his home world has gone dark. The interplay between these two versions of the story is what makes the book stand out most: there’s a resilience to the characters’ worldviews, so that far from being shattered upon contact with someone whose understanding is different, they simply interpret everything in a way that makes sense to them. In a particularly fun chapter in side-by-side columns, Nyr explains the colonization of her world to Lynesse, who nods along to what sounds like to her like an ordinary and familiar creation myth. While the plot is engaging in its own right, the biggest thing that kept pulling me forward was wanting to see how the other character understood whatever had just happened! And the book engages respectfully with both points-of-view: I think the natural tendency would be to privilege the science fiction one, for being closer to our own understanding of the world (even if technologically, Nyr’s world is eons away from ours), but Tchaikovsky never does that. People are people, whatever their origins and technology levels. And as it turns out, there are things out there beyond Nyr’s comprehension too. While it’s a short book and so has a limited number of characters, they’re also very well portrayed. Nyr’s sections are told in the first person, in a convincing voice, and his struggle with depression seems to have resonated with a lot of readers. Lynesse—whose sections are in third person—is just a lot of fun, as she’s wild and impulsive and actually treated as such by the narrative. Their stories are both engaging, the writing is strong and suits both versions of the story, and the ending is excellent. It provides an emotionally satisfying conclusion for both protagonists (and it’s not a romantic one!), while still maintaining surprising realism, particularly in Lynesse’s relationship to her mother’s court. I do have a few quibbles. What the book presents through Nyr is a caricature of anthropology: not without relation to real themes and concerns in the field, but in the real world it’s a discipline that has long understood participant-observation as a valid research method and that some level of emotional involvement will happen and isn’t the end of the world. Also, both Tchaikovsky books I’ve read have featured worldbuilding that’s fun on the surface but doesn’t stand up to scrutiny: there’s a long list of reasons that, particularly in a society where fighting is done with swords, it make no sense as the sole province of women—and this is a book engaging with anthropology, after all! I also don’t love the recent trend—though most prominent in novellas, which have limited space for worldbuilding—of creating societies so matriarchal that royal families appear to contain no men, and then acting like they don’t have an inequality problem. Power does matter, after all. However, my quibbles are very much around the margins of a truly excellent novella. It fully deserves the Hugo, and is an excellent choice for readers of fantasy and science fiction both. ...more |
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1
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May 23, 2022
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May 24, 2022
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Oct 26, 2021
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Paperback
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| 1948226421
| 9781948226424
| 1948226421
| 4.05
| 4,906
| Sep 19, 2019
| Sep 03, 2019
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it was amazing
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4.5 stars This is an excellent work, combining the author’s memoir with stories of other refugees and reflections on refugees’ treatment and the diffic 4.5 stars This is an excellent work, combining the author’s memoir with stories of other refugees and reflections on refugees’ treatment and the difficulties of immigration. The prose style is strong and polished, the stories compelling, and the topic timely and important. Dina Nayeri was born in Iran, to a privileged life in which both parents were doctors. Her family was complicated—as I suspect most families are if you dig into them—and when Nayeri was a child, her mother converted to Christianity, setting off a chain of events that ended in fleeing the country with her two children. The book tells the story of Nayeri’s childhood in the Islamic Republic—the good, the bad, the contradictions—the family’s flight, their time as undocumented immigrants in the UAE, in a refugee hostel in Italy, and ultimately their resettling in Oklahoma. It also follows her quest to prove herself as a teen, and some stories from her adulthood, focusing on later engagement with refugees. The memoir is woven together with other threads, which works well for me—it keeps everything fresh, and had me eager to read whatever came next. Other threads involve accounts of several other Iranian refugees Nayeri meets, mostly in refugee camps. These portions aren’t long but they’re compelling (though I disagree that she had to create scenes and dialogue to make them so; plenty of great nonfiction does not). And Nayeri does an excellent job of bringing people to life on the page in few words, showing their personalities and interests and positions within their family, so they are depicted as full-fledged humans and not just names attached to a sad story. The same is true in her depictions of her own family, which show a great deal of nuance. Of course, there’s a purpose to all this, and that’s to discuss the realities of refugee life and push back on anti-refugee sentiment in the western world. Understanding people as human and not a faceless other is crucial. But Nayeri goes beyond that, in discussing the ways the current system makes refugees’ situations worse. For instance, the crabbed expectations of asylum officers looking for reasons to reject people rather than listening their stories with curiosity. She points out some of the ways that cultural expectation mismatches make convincing people of your honesty harder, and the ways asylum officers can expect people to have more insight into their own psychology than is realistic. She also discusses the psychological damage from accepting charity, and the importance of respecting people’s dignity, which programs set up to help all too often work against (true for the native-born poor as well as for refugees, I’d add). All in all, a thought-provoking and insightful work. It is a bit confronting, though not as much as I expected from the title—I came away with the sense that Nayeri cares deeply about these issues and wants people to understand, not that she’s glorying in self-righteousness or just wants to make white people feel guilty. And she doesn’t target just one country for criticism: the examination of the asylum process is focused mostly on the British and Dutch systems, while her own childhood immigration story takes place in the U.S. I’ll quote a couple of passages I marked, one short: “I knew that I was capable of rooting for someone who wasn’t totally on the right side of a thing. In war, villainy and good change hands all the time, like a football.” And one long: “People ask, how can I help? Get involved? Give them space? I want to say, be patient. Give them many chances. New immigrants are lonely and cautious. And refugees arrive traumatized. Every last one, even the happiest, is broken in places. They won’t always behave deservingly. Many suffer from shame, notions of inferiority. They are prone to embracing the very racism and classism that most harms them. They want to believe that the systems are fair, that they can earn their way into the good graces of the well-placed white man. They need friendship, not salvation. They need the dignity of becoming an essential part of a society. They have been so often on the receiving end of charity that when faced with someone else’s need, their generosity and skill shines. Now and then, they will fall short, their wounds will open, they will have too many needs. You might misstep and cause harm. That is better than drawing a thick line around them. In life, people disappoint each other. Messes are made. The only way to avoid pain is to distance yourself, to look down at them from the rescuer’s perch. But that denies them what they most urgently need: to be useful. To belong to a place. This, I believe, is the way to help the displaced. It is what we owe each other, to love, to bring in outsiders. Again and again, I’ve failed at it.” I especially appreciate this because I’ve seen some poorly-considered ideas about what “avoiding saviorism” means—it doesn’t mean don’t help others! It means not making people’s decisions for them, or behaving as if they’re a different species from you. My one major criticism of the book is that it focuses exclusively on refugees in a way that sometimes seems to deny that other categories of immigrant exist. People do migrate for economic reasons, after all (even if those from wealthy countries are too quick to suspect this as refugees’ “real” motive). Sometimes out of desperation, and sometimes just for a good opportunity—there are plenty of wealthy expatriates out there, after all. I don’t think Nayeri ever entirely squares this reality with her argument that no one would put themselves through fleeing their home unless their life was in danger, though she approaches the issue at the end. Overall though, I enjoyed reading this, appreciated the complexity of the personal stories and the thoughtfulness of the author’s arguments. An excellent book that should be read widely! ...more |
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1
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Dec 18, 2021
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Dec 27, 2021
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Jun 26, 2021
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Hardcover
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| 1101984597
| 9781101984598
| 1101984597
| 4.16
| 6,700
| May 29, 2018
| May 29, 2018
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it was amazing
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A truly excellent work of nonfiction: informative to the point of being downright mind-bending, and also highly readable and engaging. This is a large
A truly excellent work of nonfiction: informative to the point of being downright mind-bending, and also highly readable and engaging. This is a large book, about heredity in all its permutations, and the history of our understanding of it: from selective breeding to CRISPR, from cultural legacies to microbiomes to eugenics. The biggest focus is genetics, but as it turns out that’s a whole lot more complicated than most of us realize, when we often carry disparate lineages of cells even within our own bodies! Below, some wild and fascinating things I learned from this book: - You get 50% of your genes from each parent, but within the parents’ egg and sperm cells, meiosis scrambles up the DNA they received from each of their parents—meaning, your mom doesn’t necessarily give you exactly half of what she received from each of her parents. Thus, you might be more genetically similar to some grandparents than others. Siblings on average share 50% of their DNA, but in reality, siblings have been found with ranges from 37-62%. - For the same reason, the further someone is from you on your family tree, the less likely you are to share any DNA at all (at least, anything recognizably individual; 99%+ of the human genome, after all, is shared by all humans). Among third cousins, 1% share no individual DNA. Among fourth cousins, it’s 25%. - And the same holds true with ancestors: the further back you go, the greater the chance that no recognizable individual segments of DNA come from any particular ancestor. Go back 10 generations (roughly 250-300 years) and there’s a 46% chance you are not “related” to any given ancestor at all. - We think of our ancestry as a forking tree, with no overlap. The problem is, go back one or two thousand years, and the number of individual forks representing your ancestors adds up to more people than have ever lived. Mathematically, all of our ancestors had to be related to each other. - Mathematical models have also shown that, within a population (say, people of European descent), if you go back 1000 years, anyone who has any descendants living today is an ancestor of all people in that population living today. And that five thousand years ago, anyone with any living descendants is an ancestor of all living people. [I was disappointed that the author didn’t question this, because it’s obviously untrue. Native American and Pacific Islander populations left the Old World more than 5000 years ago, and have only been in contact for the last 200-500 years. Even if all Native Americans and Pacific Islanders alive today have since acquired Old World ancestry—which another study in the book assumes not to be the case, and the author also doesn’t question that one—I think it’s certainly fair to say that in the last few centuries, every European, African and Asian person has not acquired both Native American and Polynesian ancestry.] - The oldest modern human fossils in Europe, from about 45,000 years ago, show no genetic indication of any relation to modern Europeans, whose DNA is an amalgamation of several later groups of migrants. These oldest Europeans, genetically, appear to have come from another continent entirely and vanished 37,000 years ago. - Meanwhile, modern humans bear traces of Neanderthal DNA: about 0.08-0.34% for Africans, and 1-1.4% for non-Africans. Other ancient Neanderthal relatives, Denisovans, are also still around in our DNA, with some Pacific populations having up to 5% from this group, while East Asians and Native Americans carry noticeable amounts of Denisovan DNA as well. (So, oddly, does the book’s European-descended author!) - A weird factoid from twin studies: twins are often misclassified as fraternal vs. identical. In one study in the Netherlands, 19% of parents gave the wrong answer. Misclassified identical twins, however, are just as similar to each other as correctly classified identical twins. - Once a person is conceived, cells continue to divide—and there’s a possibility for mutation at any point in that process. (Happily, we set aside our egg and sperm cells early, so these mutations generally don’t make it to our children.) Thus, a person can be a “mosaic,” having different cells in the body coming from different lineages—which can cause diseases, or patchwork skin pigmentation, or make no difference at all. In fact, everyone has some mutations in their cell DNA. Mosaicism can also cure diseases, as the cells with a working version of a gene take over from the bad ones. - Even freakier: by the time we’re born, our cells may not be entirely our own. Twins sharing a womb swap cells back and forth, as was first discovered in a blood donor who had two blood types. As it turned out, some of her blood also had Y chromosomes. Turns out, she’d had a twin who died soon after birth, but his blood lived on in her. - Mothers and babies also exchange cells, despite the mechanisms that are supposed to prevent this. One study of girls found that 13% had at least some Y chromosomes in their blood, presumably from their brothers (or fetuses that never made it), maintained in the mother’s body and then passed on to their daughters. - And those stem cells that get into the mother’s body? They can stay forever. One theory is that these “foreign” cells may contribute to higher rates of autoimmune disease among women. But in an incredible twist, because these are stem cells, they can also pick up new roles in her body—even healing it. In one truly wild case, a woman with hepatitis had an entire lobe of her liver regrown with Y chromosome-bearing cells, whose paternity was traced to her boyfriend. Turns out, she’d had an abortion years before—but the male fetus’s stem cells stuck around and made themselves useful. Meanwhile, one study, involving autopsies of elderly women, found Y chromosome cells in the brains of 63% of them. - Then there are the “chimeras” resulting from twins merging in the early stages of embryonic development. When the twins are male and female, an intersex child can result, but with same-sex twins it tends to go unnoticed. One American woman almost lost custody of her four children when DNA tests showed that she wasn’t their mother—as it turned out, genetically, her reproductive system belonged to a different person (her unborn sister!) from the rest of her body. As far as most of her body was concerned, she was her children’s aunt despite having conceived and given birth to them. [The book does not address why Child Protective Services would have removed her children to foster care over this, but hooray American officialdom.] One has to wonder: how many men have gotten similarly negative results on paternity tests, but without the reassurance of knowing the kids came out of their body, assumed betrayal rather than hunting down the truth? - Then, of course, by the numbers only half of the cells in our body are even human—the rest are microbes along for the ride. (Human cells are far bigger than microbes, though, so by weight we’re much more human than that!) We pick up our microbiome all over the place as small children: not just from our parents (though we start picking it up in the birth canal and from our mothers’ milk, and many strains of bacteria are highly heritable), but also from other people we’re around and whatever we put in our mouths. The human microbiome is wildly diverse: one study of the microbes in people’s navels found dozens in each person, and not a single microbe common to all. - Meanwhile, the mitochondria in the cells of all living things appears to have originally been a microbe itself, whose symbiotic relationship with other cells led to becoming a part of them. This is why mitochondria has its own DNA (in humans, passed on only from the mother). - Cancer can be contagious: a facial tumor killing Tasmanian devils is traceable to a single devil, and the animals spread it by biting each other’s faces in fights. Likewise, a genital tumor in dogs is traceable back thousands of years. Only a couple of cases of contagious cancer have been reported in humans; preventing this may be one reason why our bodies react so negatively to transplants from other people. - CRISPR gene editing carries the possibility to transform populations, but it’s not as simple as you might think. Many mutations naturally die out, but a “gene drive” (a gene programmed to destroy competing versions, which can also occur in the wild) can prevent that. Scientists are experimenting with programming mosquitoes to not pass on malaria—but cautiously, knowing the ecological catastrophes that have resulted from releasing new organisms into an environment in the past. - We also shouldn’t think that CRISPR for humans, should it become available for germline editing, would immediately transform the gene pool, even if the edited genes happen to be passed on to the recipients’ descendants (a big “if” for all the reasons seen above). For instance, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis of human embryos is available now for those undergoing in vitro fertilization, and generally used to avoid passing on hereditary diseases. However, with Huntington’s disease (which any parent would want to prevent), from 2002-2012, only one in a thousand potential cases was prevented through genetic screening. - To end on another wild note, scientists have recently learned how to program somatic cells from a person’s body (for instance, skin cells) to become eggs or sperm instead. This raises the possibility not only for fertility treatments for people who can’t produce eggs or sperm, but even that same-sex couples might someday be able to have children belonging genetically to both of them. Obviously, a ton of fascinating information in this book, and it’s highly readable for the general public, interspersing scientific information with stories from history and the author’s own experiences. While I was left with a few questions about some of this information, it was a great read and one I would definitely recommend. I picked up the recommendation by reading The Lost Family, which cites this one frequently, and which is also absolutely worth reading for its human-interest stories about heredity. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 26, 2022
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Mar 11, 2022
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May 27, 2021
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Hardcover
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