Dispatches from Dystopia, by Kate Brown

I heard about Kate Brown's Dispatches from Dystopia:  Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten on NPR's book concierge.  It's a series of essays about "the very human and sometimes very fraught ways we come to understand a particular place, its people, and its history."  In this slim volume (excluding the notes, it is only 150 pages long), Brown goes to Chernobyl and Seattle and many places in between, trying to understand how humans form a sense of place.  She specifically chooses places that are forgotten, talks to people who stayed behind when everyone else moved on.

This book was a little different than what I expected, though I am not sure what exactly I expected.  It is really beautifully and empathetically written, though Brown herself has more of a role in the essays than I expected her to.  She acknowledges this at the very beginning, saying that it is difficult for her to be a third party observer when she is in the midst of the story herself.  So instead of talking about the places and the people themselves, she talks about her interactions with the people and places she visits.  In this way, Kate Brown reminds me of Rebecca Solnit.

I really enjoyed this book, mostly because it gives a new perspective on many different places.  Very real to me was the chapter on Seattle's Panama Hotel, where many Japanese-Americans left their belongings before they were sent to internment camps during World War II.  Brown talks about how some words were used over others to make the whole thing seem more palatable, how people were taken away quietly and away from others so that no one had to see what they had brought to bear:

White Seattleites in February 1942 voted overwhelmingly for the Japanese Americans' removal.  Imagine their reaction if Japanese American deportees had left their possessions in plain sight: rain-soaked laundry dangling from clotheslines, produce rotting on fruit stands, goods in shop windows fading in the sun.  The unrepressed possessions of suddenly absent fellow citizens would have told a story starkly divergent from newspaper accounts of "evacuation," safety, national security, and inevitable fealty to race.  The basement full of belongings underscores the myth of what was euphemistically called "evacuation," a term implying benevolence, a federal government seeking to remove Japanese Americans for their own safety.  Like the deportations - indeed, like the deportees - the stockpile was meant to be forgotten.  To me, the Panama's storage room of locked-away possessions served as an icon for the quiet banishment of Japanese Americans from American society.

Much of Brown's book revolves around multiple ways of looking at either the same scene or the same situation and acknowledging the different biases or assumptions that get people to those viewpoints.  For example, she describes how American scientists looked at the impact of radiation on people by first studying the environment and what the minimum exposure level of a person was to an environment; Soviet scientists looked at people, saw the symptoms, and made diagnoses based on the person, not the environment.  The approaches reached different conclusions and led to different pros and cons.  The American method has now encroached on how we view almost all environmental disasters and impacts - upon individuals, not upon a whole system.

One of my favorite things about this book was the way Brown insists that we change our perspective on people who live their lives differently than we do.  She visits Chernobyl expecting to see so many horrors, but she sees that some people do still live there.  She visits another town, Pripyat, that has since been abandoned because of a nuclear explosion but that was really quite a beautiful, idyllic place to live when things were going well.  Meaning, just because people lived in the Soviet Union, that doesn't mean they were all unhappy and miserable all the time.  They had good lives, too.

Brown's last chapter takes her to Elgin, Illinois, a town not so far from where I grew up.   She tells a story that is now familiar to many of us that grew up in America's heartland, the steel belt turned rust belt, the towns that many feel have been left behind as jobs and people and money go to the cities.  But Brown also tells the flip side of the story, of how those towns often made decisions that hurt themselves in the long run, choosing short-term profits and cost-cutting over longer-term investment.  When workers at the main employer in Elgin went on strike to fight for better wages, the company response was fierce and immediate.  "For the following century, the company suffered no more strikes, and Elgin leaders enticed other manufacturers to town with tax breaks, land grants, and arguments that Elgin was 'a poor field for the agitator.'" 

And so, even though unemployment was low, people continued to work well past the age of retirement, and 40% of married women continued to work after marrying and having children to support their families.  And then the factory left, anyway, to find even cheaper labor.  Brown talks about how, for such a prosperous country, America has many towns that look abandoned and left behind, almost ghost-like.  "These are the muted smells and sounds of amputated careers and arrested bank accounts.  Looking at the chain of churches and shops displacing one another in quick succession, feeling something between depression and despair, I think about E.P. Thompson's question - who will rescue these places from the enormous condescension of posterity?"

In some ways, Dispatches from Dystopia has the same central premise as Strangers in their Own Land - we need to give people who feel forgotten and left behind a platform from which to speak and feel valued and empowered, rather than just telling their stories from our perspectives.  But perhaps because Kate Brown made the decision to go to multiple places, to draw parallels between towns in America and towns in the Communist bloc, the American approach to science and free will vs the Soviet approach, it felt much wider-reaching.  So much of what we believe is based on justifying acts, making ourselves feel better, like using the word "evacuation" instead of "imprisonment."  Talking about "diversity" instead of "equality."  And it's only when we really push ourselves to make those connections, draw the parallels, that we can fully acknowledge what we've done and what we can do going forward.

Are you interested in learning more about this subject?:
I put up loads of links at the end of my reviews on Strangers in their Own Land and The Unwinding.

If you would like to watch a documentary about the women who still live in the Chernobyl zone, check out The Babushkas of Chernobyl.

While there, you can listen to Holly Morris' TED Talk about the women and what happy, peaceful lives they are living, contrary to what all of us would generally believe.

Holly Morris' story about the Babushkas is also included in this episode of the TED Radio Hour, Toxic.

The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson

I took advantage of having a big chunk of free time off work between Christmas and New Year's to tackle a big, meaty book.  I saw Isabel Wilkerson speak during the Chicago Humanities Festival after the election in November, and I had a feeling that her book would be a great one for me to read to start the new year.

The Warmth of Other Suns is about the Great Migration, the movement of African-Americans from the Jim Crow South to the North over several decades in the 20th century.  Wilkerson conducted hundreds of interviews.  Her book compiles many people's stories, though she focuses on three people who left various areas of the South at different times and went to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles to start new lives.

This book is excellent.  It is 540 pages of personal stories, which probably sounds like a lot, but it is not.  It feels like you are in the same room as these people as they tell you about their lives, the decisions they made, the regrets they have, the people they knew.  It's almost like a gigantic, written version of This American Life.

Like many people, I am struggling to come to grips with the way the world seems to be moving backwards to tribalism, distrust, and fear.  Reading Wilkerson's book was empowering.  When she came to speak at the Humanities Festival, she said something that I keep going back to.  I am paraphrasing, but the gist of it was, "The lesson of the Great Migration is the power of an individual choice.  They freed themselves."

Often, when reading books about minorities in the US, the general trend of stories is the same.  People who are different show up.  The people who are already there become angry.  They treat the newcomers badly (sometimes, really really badly).  The newcomers fight for their rights.  Sometimes they win.  It's an important story to tell because it happens so consistently, probably everywhere, but definitely in the United States.  But it's also just depressing and disheartening.  People are so frightened by anything that is different, no matter how superficial that difference might be, or no matter how ridiculous that fear is.  And they fight back in terrifying, brutal ways.

 But even against all that, a backdrop of hate and threats and physical violence, people fight.  And that's what was so, so wonderful about this book.  Even people with very little of their own, barely scraping by and with no rights of their own - they resisted and they fought and they made the world a more accepting and welcoming and equal place for all of us.  As Wilkerson said, "The Great Migration... was a step in freeing not just the people who fled, but the country whose mountains they crossed... It was, if nothing else, an affirmation of the power of an individual decision, however powerless the individual might appear on the surface."

A few snapshots from this book really stood out to me:
1.  Ida Mae Gladney coming to Chicago in the 1930s and realizing that she had the opportunity and the right to vote and that her vote would be heard and counted.  She had never even bothered trying to vote before.  Many, many years later, she would vote for Barack Obama for Illinois state senator.

2.  Robert Foster's desperate search for a motel to spend the night on his drive to his new life in Los Angeles.  He went from motel to motel and was denied a room at every single one.  Finally, he broke down and told one couple that he was a veteran, that he was a physician, that he meant no harm to anyone and just wanted to sleep.  They still refused.

3.  The story of a man who worked with the NAACP, was locked up in a mental institution, and then escaped with the help of a coordinated effort that had him in a coffin and traveling across state lines in different hearses.

4.  The store clerk who owned a dog and taught that dog many tricks.  One trick was for the clerk to ask the dog if he'd rather be black or dead.  The dog was trained to respond by rolling over and playing dead.

There were many more stories about oppression and resistance, the times people bowed to authority and the times they defied it.  The many ways that people faced indignities and swallowed the insults, turned the other cheek, and then came back to fight another round.  The consequences of leaving behind family and friends to start a new life.  The consequences of working long, hard hours to make a better life for a family that you rarely get to see.  The consequences of moving from the rural south to the industrial north.

I don't think I've done a good job of describing why this book is so moving.  But it's a huge book, and it covers so much!  It's hard to cover all of that in one post.  All I can say is that it is an excellent story of how much progress we've made and the cost of that progress, not only for the country as a whole but for so many individual people.  And it serves as an important reminder that individual decisions matter and can make a difference in the world.

All the Single Ladies

I first heard Rebecca Traister when she was interviewed on NPR.  She spoke about her book, All the Single Ladies:  Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation.  I have read (or tried to read) a few non-fiction books on women that just did not work for me - Bachelor Girl and Spinster being two of them.  Traister sounded much more up my alley, and so I put her book on my radar.

I mostly read this book after the election this month.  I thought it would be difficult and painful to do, but it was more like a balm.  Throughout history, people have had to fight, tooth and nail, for their rights.  And then they have to keep fighting to keep those rights.  It's exhausting.  It takes SO LONG to move forward even an inch, and then BAM! someone else comes into office and everything moves backwards again so quickly.

It's strange, admittedly, to describe knowing this as a "balm," but it kind of is.  Every time a group fights for recognition and respect and rights, there is another group that feels threatened and fights tooth and nail against it.  Often, the group that is threatened wins.  Sadly, fear is a huge motivator.

Thus, when you look at civil rights movements throughout history, there is always this back and forth motion.  This seems to be particularly true for women's rights, though it might just seem that way to me because I have read more about the women's movements than other ones.  I suppose I have  accepted that we are now in what appears to be a global backward motion on many civil rights.  When I say that I have "accepted" this, I don't mean that I won't fight for those rights.  What I mean is that I realize there are highs and lows, and I feel like this is our low.  It's our time to fight so that we move even further when we get to the next high.  Perhaps knowing that we are at the low and looking at history makes me realize that there are still highs to come.

Back to the book.

I listened to All the Single Ladies on audiobook, so I don't have a lot of quotes to share.  That said, there were many quotes in this book, not only from history but from very modern times, about how dangerous and selfish and horrible single women are.  This risk of women not reproducing to continue the species (or a very specific portion of the species) seems to threaten people at all levels and at all times and for all reasons.

What I really enjoyed about Traister's approach is that she looked at single women from many perspectives.  She talks about how life for women in cities is different than life in suburban and rural areas, about female friendship, about women living on their own.  She talks about why women choose to stay single (for work, money, independence, choice), not only rich women but also poor women.  She talks about how people assume single women live hugely promiscuous lives when the reality is usually quite different, single moms, and the families that women create for themselves when they are not married.

Right at the start, Traister admits that she has an urban, educated, white slant to her book.  That said, she does make some effort to meet and talk to people who have had different experiences.  She also cites a lot of evidence about people from many walks of life.

I have been single my whole life, and I have many single female friends, and this book really resonated with me.  Contrary to what many people think, I do not spend my nights desperately wishing there was a man in my life (though admittedly, there are some times, usually during engagement parties and weddings and showers, when I do).  I also don't go out with dozens of guys a year.  I'm not a shrew who is unkind to people (though I admit that I can be quite unkind to people I dislike strongly), and I'm not an anti-social, awkward person who stays at home every night with her books and wine (though I do enjoy evenings by myself just as much as I enjoy spending time with other people).  I would be happy to find a guy that I really love and get married, but if I do not meet one, I am pretty sure I will be happy and fulfilled in my life.  Except, of course, for everyone always wondering why I am single and what's wrong with me and when I'll finally stop being so picky.

Rebecca Traister understands all of this, and I felt so validated by this book.  I think many people would.  I love how Traister sets up historical "norms" as completely outside the norm.  For example, so many people look back on women getting married young and then having children as being the basis of so much economic growth and prosperity.  But even through history, many women have had to work outside the home to make ends meet.  And people make it seem as though women are being selfish and thinking only of themselves and putting the world at great risk.  But really, they're just making reasonable decisions for themselves, and people who complain about what they're doing should just get over themselves.

This book is not exhaustive by any means, but I don't think Traister is trying to be exhaustive.  She shares anecdotes about herself and from her friends, she tells us about the choices women have made through history and now, and what some of the numbers behind the trends mean.  I think this book would be a fantastic companion to Gail Collins' books about women in America and the long, winding path that the women's movement has taken.  Those books (referenced below) give a bit more breadth to the history whereas Traister's book has a personal and more "everyday woman" feel.

I've been reading a ton of non-fiction lately!  Sorry for all the heavy subject reviews.  Though really, this book is not heavy by any means - it's a very informative read, and I am glad to add it to my list of books that are refreshing and kind to women who make choices in life that not everyone understands.

Want to dig deeper on this subject?  Here are a few links:

Shorter reads -
"On Spinsters," by Briallen Hopper, which is a review of a different book but makes fantastic points
 "We Just Can't Handle Diversity," by Lisa Burrell, about how we all have biases and should acknowledge them instead of pretending we are totally objective about stuff

Long reads -
America's Women and When Everything Changed, by Gail Collins; I love these books about the history of women's rights and empowerment in America
Delusions of Gender, by Cordelia Fine; also absolutely amazing

Have a listen - 
The Lady Vanishes episode of the Revisionist History podcast

Watch -
"We Should All be Feminists" TEDx video by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

"This anxiety of non-belonging."

As soon as I read the New York Times' book review of Susan Faludi's In the Darkroom, I knew I wanted to read it.  I immediately put it on hold at the library, and I went to pick it up the same day my hold came in.

I have struggled a lot with my reading this year.  But this book brought back so much of that enjoyment to me.  Every day after work last week, I would finish my dinner, pour myself a glass of wine, and then settle down on my sofa for some quality reading.

I set myself the task this summer of being more outgoing, of inviting a lot of different people to do a lot of things with me, and of trying to form true friendships with new people.  It has been a lot of work (and I wouldn't say it always feels particularly rewarding), but it's also been pretty fun and kept me extremely busy.  I have a feeling the people I have gotten to know over the past few months probably think that I am far more extroverted and social than I would probably ever describe myself as being.

For whatever reason, last week, I made no plans.  I had no plans for ten days in a row.  It was the perfect time to settle down with a good, meaningful, beautiful book.  And I'm so glad that In the Darkroom was there because it is one of the most moving books I have read in a very long time.

I almost hesitate to share a summary of the book because I think it will frighten some people away, and that would be sad.  At a high level, the book is about a grown woman coming to know her father after many years of estrangement, after he has undergone a sex change operation to become a woman.  She goes to meet her father in Budapest and the story unwinds from there, from his childhood growing up in a very wealthy Jewish family to the horrors of the Holocaust and the many re-inventions he underwent before this final one - choosing to live as a woman at the age of 76.

[Apologies if I am misusing pronouns here; Faludi refers to her father as "him" before the operation and as "her" after.  I will try to do the same.]

Faludi is a staunch feminist, and as she talks to her father and others who have undergone the male-to-female operation, she is struck by their adherence to traditional (stereotypical) gender norms.  Her father says troubling things like, "Now I can communicate better, because I'm a woman... It helps that I'm a woman.  Because women don't provoke."  She reads memoirs of women who talk about their experience, and none of them sound very feminist at all.  Take this quote from Jan Morris.  As Jim Morris, she had climbed Mt. Everest.  And yet, as a woman:

"I was even more emotional now.  I cried very easily, and was ludicrously susceptible to sadness or flattery.  Finding myself rather less interested in great affairs (which are placed in a new perspective, I do assure you, by a change of sex), I acquired a new concern for small ones.  My scale of vision seemed to contract... It is, I think, a simpler vision that I now possess.  Perhaps it is nearer a child's."

It's difficult not to be offended by the comments above.  And yet, most men who want to undergo sex change operations to become women have to pass a horrible test that dates from mid-century and very much requires them to conform to stereotype.  In order to be approved for the operation, they are expected to say that they don't mind putting their careers on hold or not being the bread winner, etc.  I had no idea this was the case.  The way that all of these memoirs are written with this assumption that women are inherently different than men in their approach to the world, and that feminists are stupid to want to change things because being a woman is just such grand fun, is very hard to take.  For Faludi, whose father fetishized womanhood prior to her operation with costumes and posed photos and then became much more conservation after her operation (this happens a lot, it seems), it must have have been overwhelming.

Faludi doesn't only tackle feminism, though.  She also talks a lot about Jewish identity.  Faludi is not very religious, but she doesn't have to be.  "I was someone with only the vaguest idea of what it meant to be a Jew who was nevertheless adamant that I was one."  Her father's relationship with religion was much more up and down.  Born to affluent but negligent parents who didn't even attend his bar mitzvah, Istvan Friedman shed his Jewish identity during World War II when Hungary became extremely anti-Semitic.  The many stories he recounts over the course of this book are amazing; he saved his parents' lives and the lives of many others, often by pretending to be a Nazi.  He escaped Hungry with friends on a fantastic lie.  He moved to Brazil, changed his name to Steven Faludi, and then moved to America, got married and had a family.  It was only when Susan said she was considering becoming a Christian that he informed her, quite violently, that she was Jewish.  "I remember exactly what I said.  That they exterminated the Jews.  And how could you do this?"

There are many stories like this in Hungary.  After World War II, there was Communism.  Many people hid their religion just to get by.  Only now are people (ironically, some of them ultra-right-wing politicians who denounce Jews) coming to know their family history and religion.  Faludi shares some of these stories in a beautiful chapter in which she attends Rosh Hashanah services and dinner with her father.  Temples that were built to hold hundreds now cater to groups of twenty or fifty.

In the Darkroom is one of the most moving books I have read in a long time.  The way Faludi weaves her own story with her father's and Hungary's, and that thorny issue of identity, is beautiful.

I studied my father's face, averted as it so often had been in life.  All the years she was alive, she'd sought to settle the question of who she was.  Jew or Christian?  Hungarian or American?  Woman or man?  So many oppositions.  But as I gazed upon her still body, I thought:  there is in the universe only one true divide, one real binary, life and death.  Either you are living or you are not.  Everything else is molten, malleable.

A beautiful, troubled city

Hello again, friends.  Once again, it has been a while.  I have been very up and down over the past several months, and certainly since my last post.  Sometimes, I feel very optimistic about the future and really believe that good people doing good things can make good changes in the world.  And sometimes, I'm just exhausted and saddened.  I have been reading, though not as much as I usually do.  And not many books that I feel compelled to review.

I have been drawn to non-fiction of late, possibly in the hope that my reading facts will compel the rest of the world to trust in facts.  Or to help me make sense of how the world came to be the way it is now (though I do feel strongly that fiction can help just as much as non-fiction in that regard).

I recently read Natalie Y. Moore's The South Side:  A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation.  As I think many of you know, I have lived in or around Chicago my whole life, and I love the city so much.  But it is a city with deep-rooted problems.  It's a city that can break your heart if you let it, from a legacy of corrupt politicians, gang violence, police brutality, and segregation.  Martin Luther King, Jr. said that he had never faced such virulent racism anywhere as he faced in Chicago.  The beautiful, striking skyline that locals love so much came at a huge cost to many communities and people.

Natalie Moore writes about her own life growing up on Chicago's south side (the historically black area of the city) and then settling back on the south side as an adult.  Her book is so many things:  an homage to her happy childhood, a guide to so many of the city's overlooked neighborhoods (and restaurants!), and an indictment of how little the government has done to invest in black neighborhoods.  The facts she shares about what it's like to be Black in America are pretty horrifying, not only because it's so obvious that racism is there, but because it just seems so endemic.  I know that a lot of racism is under the surface now, even sub-conscious.  But its consequences are just as real and impactful, and it's just so sad.

The chapter that most affected me was the one on gun violence in Chicago.  Some have given the city the nickname "Chiraq" due to how many people have been killed here (one year, more than the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq).  As someone who lives in the city, I would say the news of shootings and killings is absolutely constant, particularly in the summer.  It's unending.  It's horrifying.  It's such a tragedy I don't even know how to describe it without sounding trite.  And it makes Chicagoans themselves scared of their city.  People don't take public transportation after a certain time.  We don't walk in parks after dark.  We tell people when we reach home safely.  And there are some neighborhoods that people just won't go to.  Such as many, many neighborhoods on the south side.  We won't even stop for gas there, let alone think of shopping or eating there, or definitely not living there.

I have, of course, always been aware that violence in Chicago has an indelible impact on communities.  Kids who can't play outside, teens who can't go to school, family structures broken down.  But I don't think I realized just what a huge economic drain it is, too.  If everyone is too scared to visit a neighborhood or to even walk around outside, then business suffers.  And if businesses don't feel like they can invest in a neighborhood, then no one is ever going to move to them.  And property values decline, and people move out, and the city continues to shrink, to condense in the very gentrified central area.  And when you refer to a community as a "war zone," you automatically think about punishment and strong enforcement as the only means of solving the problem.  You don't think about how to work with the community for longer-term solutions or addressing the root of the issue because you're so busy scrambling to save lives in the moment, to stop that next gun from being purchased.  Its consequences are much more far-reaching than I ever considered, and it makes me even sadder for my city than I was before.

I also really enjoyed the chapter about food and access to food.  Whole Foods is opening a massive store in Englewood, one of Chicago's poorest (and most dangerous) neighborhoods, and it created quite a stir.  Were they trying to gentrify the neighborhood?  Were they trying to do good?  Would people be able to afford to shop there?  Were they going to bring some cheapened version of their store that wasn't as nice as the other Whole Foods in wealthier neighborhoods?  It was so fascinating to read multiple points of view on this.  The store is slated to open this fall, and I hope it helps the community.

Moore talks about many more topics in her book - public housing and public schools, her own childhood, property values, the pros and cons of integration vs access to the same resources, and so much more.  Her own love (and frustration) with the city comes through strong and clear.  Obviously, people who live in or around Chicago are probably most likely to be interested in this book, but I think much of what is true about Chicago is true around America, or at least the Midwest.  And if you are not American, and look at America now and wonder what is happening, I think this book would be a good primer to help you understand.  It's really well-written, very evocative of the city's highs and lows, and I am so glad I read it.  There's a reason that I came out of my semi-blogging retirement to write about it and urge you all to read it.  I hope you do.

The other side of history

As happens every January, I started 2016 with a determination to read at least a few more books from my shelves than I did last year.  I started with Ronald Wright's Stolen Continents:  500 Years of Conquest and Resistance in the Americas.  The subtitle is pretty self-explanatory; it's a book that retells the history of the Americas not as a story of inevitable European takeover, but one in which the native populations fought long and hard for their lands and rights.  Wright focuses on five nations in particular:  the Aztecs, the Inca, the Maya, the Cherokee and the Iroquois.

As you might expect, this book is pretty depressing.  There was a tremendous, horrible loss of life when Europeans came to the Americas.  Yes, a lot of American Indians died of disease, smallpox in particular, but a lot of them were also brutally murdered and displaced.  Reading about the immensity of the plague and the brutality of the killings is a very chilling experience.  But it happened, and it's important we acknowledge it.

I learned a lot from this book about the politics and religions and social structures of cultures I don't know a lot about.  I wouldn't say that I am at all well-read on the subject of treaties or laws with regard to Native American nations, but I have read some books on the subject and they are all depressingly similar.  So many broken promises and so much bad treatment.  I am always reminded of Charles C. Mann's excellent book 1491, in which he goes into glorious detail about the cultures and beliefs of so many cultures alive and well in the Americas before Europeans arrived.

Wright's book is a bit harder to read than Mann's, perhaps because his anger is so obvious that it's hard to think of him as an objective writer.  I'm not calling his facts into question, more his interpretation of events and people to always assume the best of anyone who was Native American and the worst of anyone who was not.  In a way, Wright fell into the same trap of stereotyping people that he so hated; it was hard to read and not be reminded a little warily of the whole Noble Savage trope.  Even so, there are so many eloquent and rich quotes in this book from people that we never learn about in school, and I'm so glad that Wright gave them a voice and the spotlight here.

I found a lot of interest in this book, particularly with regard to mestizo culture and the way South America and Mexico approach race relations compared to the way we do in the United States,

But it's hard to read books that delve into this seedier side of American and world history.  It's hard to imagine such a cataclysmic event as smallpox taking out a huge portion of a population, and then a systematic insistence on kicking people when they're down.  The racism that is inherent in colonialism, in conquest, in forced religious conversion, is so overwhelming.  That it happens through every age of human history, again and again, to so many beautiful and vibrant cultures, is just more depressing.  It's like we never learn.

I am glad I read this book, but I would still recommend Charles C. Mann's 1491 over it if you want to learn more about pre-First Contact cultures in the Americas.  Stolen Continents reminded me a lot of An Indigenous History of the United States.  Just because it's hard to read doesn't mean you shouldn't read it.

George Orwell's War

I am not sure what exactly piqued my interest in the Spanish Civil War.  I feel like there are so many books set during World War II, but hardly any (at least in English) set during the Spanish Civil War that immediately preceded it.  Considering the impact the war had on so many influential people, it seemed like something I should try to learn more about.

I chose George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia as my introduction to the conflict, mostly because it was available at the library on audiobook.  While that isn't the most flattering reason to choose a book, I didn't really know what else would work.  I didn't want a super-detailed, exhaustive history, and I wanted to read a first-hand account.

Orwell was a pretty great guide.  I loved his dry sense of humor.  It is hard to imagine Orwell having strong feelings about anything, based on his narrative style, but clearly he felt strongly enough about a cause to go to a foreign country and fight for it.  (And, obviously, he felt strongly about many things, based on the subjects he chose to write about.)

I do think many of the intricacies of the politics and maneuverings were over my head, possibly because I was reading this via audiobook and possibly because Orwell assumed that his readers would have at least a passing knowledge of current events at the time of publication.  Unfortunately, I have hardly any working knowledge of what was going on during the Civil War, so I was a bit at sea during some chapters.  But I didn't mind because the other chapters were very engaging.  Orwell definitely falls victim to stereotyping, describing Spaniards as slow and lazy, Italians as fashionable, etc., but he does it with so much humor that it's hard to take it very seriously.  He also gives himself the same treatment - at the beginning of the book, he talks about his obsession with learning how to use a machine gun, and using his very limited Spanish skills to ask if he can learn every day.  But instead of mastering the weapon, all the soldiers are taught is how to look good in a parade.

But even more than the humor, what stood out in this book was Orwell's own experience in the war.  He started as an idealist socialist, but as the war continued and he saw first-hand the effect on both soldiers and civilians, the propaganda machine, the lies and the politics, his perspective changed.  He no longer trusted the Communists to be honest and straight-forward; he saw that they, too, lied and cheated and committed all sorts of atrocities.  And then, I assume, he went and wrote Animal Farm, which proceeds in much the same manner.

Homage to Catalonia is an excellent read to fully appreciate Orwell's writing style and humor.  It's also a very honest look at how ideals can be lost in the midst of a horrible and bloody war.  While I don't know if it's the best book to read to get an understanding of the background and lead-up to the Spanish Civil War, it's definitely an excellent book to get you interested in the conflict.  And to understand a man's internal conflict, too.  Highly recommended.

Review-itas: Characters in places they do not belong

It's hard to talk about Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves without giving away a major plot twist, though I would say that the plot twist is given away in many reviews, so maybe it is not really a twist.

I hadn't really heard anything about this book until it showed up on so many people's Best of 2014 lists.  It's narrated by Rosemary, a hilarious and likable woman looking back on her childhood and her college years.  Rosemary had an unusual upbringing; her father was a psychologist and her mother a scientist, and there were many experiments performed on Rosemary and her siblings, Fern and Lowell, throughout their childhood.  But one day, Fern disappears, and then Lowell leaves, too, and Rosemary spends the rest of her life trying to put her family back together again.

I did the audiobook for Fowler's novel and loved the narrator.  She really captured the dry sense of humor that pervades the whole book.  While I don't think this book will end up on my best of 2015 list, I really enjoyed its quirky sense of humor and the way Fowler makes clear that our actions have consequences that can echo down for years and years.

This book did remind me a bit of Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats in that there are portions of it that are tough to swallow.  If you are an animal rights activist, be warned.  That said, if you are an animal rights activist, I think you would really get a lot from this book.

I picked up Nick Bertozzi's Shackleton:  Antarctic Odyssey on a whim at the library and read it that night as I needed a break from A Brief History of Seven Killings (more on that book when I finish it).  I find the whole era of Arctic and Antarctic exploration completely fascinating, and was excited to read about Shackleton's ill-fated trip to the South Pole in graphic novel format.

But a lot of things happened to Shackleton over a very long period of time, and I don't think a slim graphic novel is the best way to share the story.  This felt quite choppy and there wasn't much narrative flow.  There also wasn't a lot of explanation of what certain terms meant or why some decisions were made, which was disappointing.  I understand that one must condense, but here, it made me feel like a lot was missing.  Particularly at the beginning, where years and years passed by in just a couple of pages and I was scrambling to figure out who the characters were.

That said, Shackleton's story is pretty amazing, and it was fun to read about some of the things his crew did to keep themselves entertained through long, dark, and cold Antarctic winters.  They played soccer, drank a lot of rum, held dogsled races, and joked around with each other.  It was fun to read about these things but frustrating, too.  I can't imagine the psychological toll that being stuck in Antarctica for a year would take on people, and the way Bertozzi describes it, almost everyone was perfectly content and happy the whole way through.  I wanted way more depth.

"the best natured and best bred woman in England"

I have been making a concerted effort to read more of the books on my own shelves.  Many of those books are non-fiction books about 18th and 19th century Britain, which has been my favorite era in history since reading Jane Austen for the first time.  But in recent years, I've moved away from British history, and many of those books have sat unread while my reading tastes have changed.

But I picked up Amanda Foreman's Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and I realized that my tastes haven't changed so much.  While I am so happy to be reading more widely and diversely than before, I do still love the Georgian era.  And very few people personify the era as well as the Duchess of Devonshire.

A fashion icon, a published author, a serious party-goer with a gambling addiction, a political powerhouse much more impressive than her husband, an amateur geologist, and a loving mother, Georgiana Cavendish holds, in one person, all the excess and glory we associate with the late 1700s.  I am not entirely sure how to provide a plot summary for a biography.  Suffice it to say that Foreman gives us insights into every stage of Georgiana's life, from her childhood as her mother's favorite child, to her failed marriage with the Duke of Devonshire, to her desperation to have a son, and her serious, ever-present concerns about her gambling debts.

Foreman also brings the entire era to life (at least, the era as it was lived by the ridiculously rich people at the very top).  She talks about 18th century politics at length and with authority, covers the French Revolution, and gives us a glimpse into the fashionable life.  I admit the descriptions of men's fashion in particular completely bowled me over:

Fox's particular contribution was to experiment with hair color, powdering his hair blue one day, red the next. He wore multicolored shoes and velvet frills...

I mean, can you imagine this man with red hair and velvet frills?  The mind boggles as to why all painters neglected to include this key identifying characteristic in any of his portraits.

Charles James Fox, alas without red or blue powdered hair

Georgiana was a leader of fashion herself, with the most epic hairstyles you can imagine.  She is probably best remembered for her high-flying lifestyle and the scandalous three's company type existence she lived with her husband and her best friend, Lady Elizabeth Foster.  Bess  also happened to be her husband's mistress for several years and bore two of his children.  But this is unfair to Georgiana.  Foreman admits in her introduction that she fell more in love with Georgiana the more she read about her, and it's hard to read this book without falling in love with her yourself.  Her life was so bittersweet:

She was an acknowledged beauty yet unappreciated by her husband, a popular leader of the ton who saw through its hypocrisy, and a woman whom people loved who was yet so insecure in her ability to command love that she became dependent on the suspect devotion of Lady Elizabeth Foster.  She was a generous contributor to charitable causes who nevertheless stole from her friends, a writer who never published under her own name, a devoted mother who sacrificed one child to save the other three, a celebrity and patron of the arts in an era when married women had no legal status, a politician without a vote, and a skilled tactician a generation before the development of professional party politics.

Seriously, the Duchess was no joke.  We get to know her pretty well, but there are still so many more things I wanted to know.  So many things hinted at but frustratingly hard to find out.  This may be because so many of her papers were lost or censored by later (ahem, Victorian) generations.  It could also be because Foreman didn't have the inclination to write a much longer book.  But there are so many events or people hinted at that fall to the wayside later on - for example, what was so unlikable about the Duke's daughter Caroline that everyone commented upon how awkward and weird she was as a child?  And then she just disappears!  And why in the world did Georgiana's daughter Harryo want to marry her aunt's lover?  And what was Lady Elizabeth Foster really after?  How did Georgiana treat her servants?  How does one even begin to prepare for a dinner party with 1000 guests?  I want to know!

But what I do know, even with those minor frustrations, is that history has given Georgiana the short shrift.  She was so much more than she is given credit for, and when you read her letters and see how desperately lonely she was, and how she overcame that loneliness so much to be politically savvy and wonderfully kind and so generous, you will be as enchanted with her as London society was.

But if it was difficult to read this book and not fall in love with the duchess it was well nigh impossible to read it and not be completely astounded by the amount of money the aristocracy spent, burned, gambled, frittered away or just lost track of.  Many of these people had 7- and 8-digit incomes or personal wealth and practically all of them were in debt.  To each other.  For gambling losses.  I cannot even comprehend how one can be a millionaire one day and then lose an entire fortune that night to a passing acquaintance.  I just... wow.  Even though I feel pretty familiar with the Georgian era, I think I must severely underestimate just how strong the sense of entitlement was among the super-rich.

I thoroughly enjoyed this biography and highly recommend it.  As Foreman points out, Georgiana was in every sense of the word a product of her time.  She brilliantly maneuvered not just in the "women's sphere" of hearth and home but also used her influence and friends to make real and lasting impact on the larger world that we historically associate with men.  She breaks down the entire notion of "separate spheres" and shows just how valuable women could be in the political arena.  She's pretty amazing, and I'm glad to know more about her.

Note:  The Georgians were really, really dramatic in pretty much everything they did.  They wrote very effusive letters, they made grandiose gestures, said very intense things... it was truly awe-inspiring to read.  I think the Victorians were pretty dramatic, too, so WHEN DID WE BECOME SO CALM?  (Written in all capitals for ironic effect.)  I was truly uncomfortable with the hair-tearing, the excessive weeping, the cloyingly affectionate (to me) descriptions - when did this happen?  No wonder no one faints any more.  We are all in a state of perpetual calm.

The American Experience, from an Indigenous Perspective

I knew that reading Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous People's History of the United States would be difficult.  But I don't think I realized just how difficult it would be.  Reading about massacres and pillaging and forced relocation is difficult enough in print, but it is even more stomach-clenching to listen to it.

Most American kids go into school assuming that it was a foregone conclusion that their country would take over an entire continent.  We learn about the first settlers and the way the Indians helped them through the first few winters.  And then, after they'd gotten the hang of it, the settlers went on their merry way, spreading all the way to the Pacific.  We learn about the glorious Homestead Act, passed after the Civil War so that Americans could all have their own plot of land to improve.  It's rarely explained to us that the only reason the US government was able to provide land to its citizens is because it stole that land from multiple Native American nations.  Or that so much of America's history, foreign wars, and expansion plans were done in a disturbingly (and pretty openly) white supremacist manner.

Dunbar-Ortiz's main point is that America was not formed as a new and brilliant democracy, a country that came about through a belief in a strong, new way of governing.  Instead, the US was a direct result of European politics.  The expansion into other lands, the belief that the Christian religion is superior to others, the escalation of skirmishes to total warfare that not only take place on a battlefield but include rape and pillage of entire villages.

It is important that Americans (and everyone else) fully understand their nation's history, so I feel like people should read this book.  Even though I knew the US treated Indians badly throughout its history, I don't think I realized just how systemic and terrible it was.  And I appreciated the shift in perspective; rather than learning American history, I learned how America's history butted against that of the indigenous people's and destroyed so many cultures.  Early on, Dunbar-Ortiz quotes one of my absolute favorite books, Charles C. Mann's 1491, and it just brought home to me once again how much the world lost when the Native American population was just decimated, in natural knowledge, worldviews, philosophies and so much more.

So yes, I DO think you should read this book.  BUT...

It's really difficult.  As I mentioned before, there's a lot of carnage.  Much of it felt more like a list of massacres and other horrible acts rather than a cohesive history.  Dunbar-Ortiz skips around a lot in time, which was difficult to follow.  And there are clearly certain things that truly enrage her, such as the official American military definition of enemy territory as "Indian Country," which she harps on so many times that I thought my audiobook was faulty and kept skipping back to earlier in the narrative.  I agree wholeheartedly that this terminology should change, but I also think she could make the point once and trust her readers to understand it.

I personally don't recommend the audiobook edition.  Not just because it is much harder to listen to the violence, but also because the narrator's voice is quite dry and it sounds like she is being sardonic all the time.

Review-itas: The Not-Quite-Hits Edition

I really want to read G. Willow Wilson's Miss Marvel comic book series.  While looking for it on the library website, I came across this other graphic novel by her, Cairo, and decided to give that one a try while I waited.

I read Wilson's Alif the Unseen about a year ago and had mixed feelings about it.  While I liked the lead female character and the genie, and the way Wilson weaved modern religion into her story, I thought the details of the plot were pretty difficult to follow.

My feelings about Cairo are pretty much the same, even down to the genie.  Wilson converted to Islam in college, and I really appreciate the way she uses her stories to educate readers about the religion.  She shares an Islam that is respectful, peaceful, and kind.  In a world that often portrays the religion in a very negative, extreme light, I can't speak highly enough of stories that show it as progressive and welcoming.

The plot, though, was still hard to follow.  Wilson seems unwilling to write "conventional" fantasy stories, which is fine, but she also seems to have trouble translating what is in her mind to paper, and so readers are left a little confused.  Or at least this reader is left confused.  Perhaps because religion is such a strong component of her stories, the aspirations are much more high-level than what I am used to and such nebulous descriptions of key components to the story make it hard to understand what's going on.

Still, I cannot wait to read Miss Marvel!

One book I started but did not finish was Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy, by Karen Abbott, a historical account of four women who participated in different ways in the American Civil War.

I had a vague recollection of the author's name, and when I realized that she was the author of Sin in the Second City, I had a feeling that I wouldn't love this book.  I really enjoy non-fiction, particularly history, but I feel like the events and the people are fascinating enough.  Authors don't need to add a lot of fluff to make the stories interesting.  Abbott, in my opinion, sensationalizes history a little too much.  It's very difficult to tell with her writing where the facts stop and her own hypotheses begin.  She attributes thoughts and feelings to historical figures without really providing any footnotes as to whether those are real or not.

The four women she includes in this book were spies on both sides of the war, and I'm sure they were all fascinating in their own right.  I loved that they were not limited by their sex but were willing to use other people's preconceived notions and beliefs about women to get ahead.  I would love to learn more about all four of these women, but I don't think Abbott's book is quite the right way for me to do so.  This book is much more a light beach read on the non-fiction scale, which has a lot of value in its own right, but just isn't right for me.

Also, seriously - the book is about women who did underground activities during the American Civil War.  I feel like she could have featured at least one woman of color here!  There are a couple of loyal slaves and servants mentioned who have parts to play, but I think Abbott could have put the spotlight on someone if she really wanted to.

Mid-Summer Reviewitas

According to LibraryThing, How Green Was My Valley entered my TBR pile on December 1st, 2006.  And there it sat until, in one of my bursts of TBR pile guilt, I decided to knock it off my list via audiobook.

The book is about Huw Morgan, who grows up in a rural mining community in Wales.  The story is told from the POV of Huw many years later, as he looks back on all the hardships and drama that impacted the people around him, and his fruitless love for his beautiful sister-in-law.

The story is about a coal mining family in the early 20th century, so obviously it's not a super-happy story.  There are strikes and hard times, lusting after other people's spouses, people leaving for better opportunities, and crazy gossip that people take crazy seriously.  The book felt like a well-written soap opera about the working class.

Llewelyn really fits the Welsh stereotype of being wonderfully musical.  His sentences are like songs, with a rhythm and dance all their own.  I am glad I have this book on my shelves so that I can read it with my eyes one day, not just with my ears.

The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, by Jeanne Theoharis, is one I've had on my Kindle for some months now.  Rosa Parks is a personal hero as well as a national one.  For those who may not know the American Civil Rights movement well, Rosa Parks was the woman "who started it all" by refusing to get up from her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama.  She was used as a symbol to rally around, the impetus for the Montgomery bus boycott that ended in de-segregating the buses, and Martin Luther King, Jr. shot to fame and the Civil Rights movement was underway.

But there was obviously much more to the Civil Rights movement, and there was a great deal more to Rosa Parks, too.  Her refusal to give up her seat on the bus was just one of many acts of defiance - she had been active in the movement for years before and she stayed active for years later; as she said, "It's always amazing to me that people thought it was [startling].  It seems to me it's natural to want to be treated as a human being."  She truly was an amazingly determined woman who "was quiet and sweet, but strong as acid."  (What a fantastic way of describing a person!  I love it!)

I admit this book became a bit repetitive and dry in the later chapters.  Rosa Parks struggled a lot, both in Montgomery and Detroit, and the author spent a lot of time discussing how soul-killing the Civil Rights movement could be, when people thought no change would come in their lifetimes.  But Parks truly was such an inspiring and wonderful person, well deserving of a detailed biography, and I'm so glad to have learned more about her.

JK Rowling/Robert Galbraith's second book in the Cormoran Strike mystery series is called The Silkworm.  This time, Cormoran and Strike are on the case of a missing B-list author whose last unpublished manuscript excoriated many people in the book business.

Between The Cuckoo's Calling and The Silkworm, Rowling has a lot of commentary on the upper echelons of British cultural society.  Most of it isn't very positive, so I wonder how bored she gets at all the publishing galas and dinners that she probably must attend.

This outing is even darker than The Cuckoo's Calling.  The missing author wrote truly bizarre scenes and left chaos in his wake.  Strike's ex-fiancee, Charlotte, is engaged to be married, and he has to come to terms with that and with the tiny jibes that she keeps sending his way.  I admit that, only two books into this series, I am already tired of the whole Strike/Charlotte drama.  It just seems to take up so much of Strike's emotional stores and Charlotte isn't given enough of a personality for us to really care what she does, anyway.  She's just like this succubus, taking time and energy and will away from the story and Strike.

In these two books, I also was annoyed by Robin's relationship with her fiancee.  She's an intelligent, driven, and beautiful woman, and it's hard to believe that she would waste her time on someone who did not value her or treat her well.  Unfortunately, that's pretty much exactly what her fiancee is like.  But through The Silkworm, we get a few hints at what drew her to him in the first place - she says very clearly that she loves him and wants to marry him, and she tells him what she wants to do with her life.  And I appreciated that.  I did not want to be in a story with another beautiful, intelligent woman who just doesn't have the self-esteem to leave the jerk she's with behind.

The relationship I do love in this series is the friendship between Cormoran and Robin.  It continues to develop here, and I look forward to seeing that continue.

An ideal wife should have Meekness, Patience, Sincerity, Prudence, Zeal ...

I fell in love with Lauren Thatcher Ulrich a couple of years ago when I read her Pulitzer Prize-winning book about a colonial midwife, A Midwife's Tale.  Immediately, I purchased Good Wives:  Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England 1650-1750.  I just finished Good Wives last night and let me tell you, it is just as fascinating as A Midwife's Tale.

Good Wives has a subtitle that is quite descriptive but still only hints at its details and depths.  In the introduction to this book, Ulrich mentions a gravestone that says a woman was "Eminent for Holiness, Prayerfulness, Watchfulness, Zeal, Prudence, Sincerity, Humility, Meekness, Patience, Weanedness from ye World, Self-denial, Publik-Spiritedness, Diligence, Faithfulness and Charity."

Nowadays, we would think this woman was either a) not real or b) really boring.  But Ulrich points out that in the 17th and 18th centuries, people did not try to be individuals, but to conform and be ideal.  "A good wife earned the dignity of anonymity," Ulrich says, and then she sets out in her book to show readers exactly what a "good wife" was - a loving mother, an obedient wife, and a kind neighbor.  And she also shows us what happens when women strayed from those norms, for good and bad reasons, and what the consequences were.  It is a fascinating study about a population that did not leave much behind to describe their lives to us.

Review-itas: History Audiobooks Edition

Simon Winchester's The Meaning of Everything is about the epic undertaking of creating the Oxford English Dictionary.  The process took years.  DECADES, even.  Like, more decades than most people in the era really lived.  I suppose this is reasonable, as there are a lot of words in the English language, and I can't even imagine how one goes along cataloging them and defining them.  And how political it can become.  For example, the word American was put into the first edition of the dictionary, but not African.

Winchester shares a lot of anecdotes such as the one above, and others that are much more humorous and interesting as well - a kleptomanic assistant, the little jokes the compilers put into their example sentences, the difficulties with printers... it's an entertaining book, though not supremely fascinating, and I am pretty sure that I won't remember anything from it except that the dictionary took about 70 years to create.  Ah, well.  It was fun!

Longbourn is also set in England, though during the Georgian era, not the Victorian.  This book has gotten a lot of attention recently as it is kind of a spin-off from Pride & Prejudice, but it hardly references the people and actions of that great novel; rather, it focuses its attention on the servants who work for the Bennets.  Poor as the Bennet family is, they are wealthy enough to have servants, and the servants have a very different life view than they do.  All they do, really, is work, and so they are both fascinated and repelled by people who can spend so much of their lives in leisure, and who seem to have no regard or thought for other people's comfort.

The stars of this book are the servants, particularly Sarah, the housekeeper Mrs. Hill, and the new footman James.  I enjoyed learning about how they spent their days, their small victories and never-ending exhaustion.  However, I felt very separate from them in this novel.  Maybe it was because of the narrator, but it felt to me like there was a great distance between the reader and the main characters, which was unfortunate.  Also, I found parts of this book pretty dull.  I really enjoyed learning about the "downstairs" life of a Jane Austen novel, but the characters were just so quiet and tired, I did not grow to love them as I loved Elizabeth Bennet, with her wicked sense of humor and fine eyes.

I am hoping to read more short story collections this year.  One that caught my eye was When the Emperor was Divine, by Julie Otsuka.  It's about one family's experience of the Japanese internment camps in the US during WWII.  None of the family members are ever named; they are referred to as "the woman," or "the girl" or "the boy."  This was a little strange, but I think it was done to make us feel like the story could be about any family, not just one.  While the book feels like one story, it really is a series of vignettes told from different POVs.  It was very illuminating to learn about the internment camps; while the "guests" were not necessarily treated horribly in the camps, they were given no compensation after they left, and many people came back to homes that had been poorly maintained, their belongings stolen, and many Japanese-Americans had trouble finding work after the war.

While I didn't love this book, it did really pique my interest in the internment camps.  I have Hotel on the Corner of Bitter & Sweet on my shelf to read, so I'll be sure to pick that one up soon!

The often disturbing, sometimes inspiring ways in which humans interact with animals

Finally!  I first heard about Jon Mooallem's Wild Ones:  A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America on the 99% Invisible podcast in October.  (If you have still not listened to this, you are doing yourself a grave disservice.)  I promptly put it on my library wish list.  3.5 months later, it was finally in my hands.  And now I've finished it, and it's left me with a lot to think about.

Jon Mooallem writes about raising his daughter under the cloud of knowing that the world she sees as an adult will be drastically different - half of all species on earth now could be extinct by the end of this century.  He sets out to learn about conservation in America by tracking three endangered species - the polar bear, the poster child victim of climate change; the Lange's metalmark butterfly, a tiny, delicate beauty; and the whooping crane, a species that has been on the receiving end of a truly amazing amount of human interest.

What Mooallem learns is absolutely fascinating, even if it ultimately makes you believe that wildlife conservation seems completely doomed to failure.  After all, is there a purpose to saving the polar bear if we are committed to ruining its natural habitat?  And what value does one small species of butterfly add to the world when there are so many other species that have a greater impact on their environment?  While the book is ostensibly about these animals, it is also about the many, many people who have dedicated their lives to what seems to be a losing battle of trying to save the world, one animal at a time, and just how much passion and effort and pain and heartache people put into the effort.  And that's the reassuring part alluded to in the title, I think - much as we humans are destroying the world around us and changing it irrevocably from what it originally was - we also make Hail Mary, last ditch, desperate efforts to save those species we consider "worthy," often at the expense of other animals and at great personal cost.

I've never thought of it that way before, really.  I have always looked at the flip side - how we all just go down this path of least resistance, doing what we always do and punting to the next generation to deal with things when they get to a true crisis point.  But we also spend so much energy and manpower and money and time and research trying to do the opposite, too.  For example, there are people who dedicate years of their lives to dressing up in white sheets with crane puppets on their hands, in complete silence, trying to help captive whooping cranes learn how to survive.  Then these people (still dressed in the white sheets) drive ultralight planes at a very slow, frustrating pace, down a migration pattern that they want the cranes to follow, in the hopes that these cranes will then learn to migrate south on their own.  And they land in people's farms and are hosted by these people who kindly give up part of their land every year to these cranes, even though the hosts are never allowed to see the cranes, in hopes of keeping human contact at a minimum.  It's true.  Watch here.

Can you even wrap your head around the absolute generosity that is present every day in an endeavor like this?  And whooping cranes are just one example.  There was also a fantastic story about Humphrey the Humpback, a whale that got off-track and swam upriver from the ocean, and then all of the human effort that people exerted to get it back into the ocean.



For all of our capacity for harm on a massive scale, human beings also have a true capacity for greatness on an individual level.  The question remains, however, whether those individual efforts will ever be enough to keep species alive and viable in the future, or if they will forever more rely on humans for their survival.

I learned so many things from this book.  For example, the Lange's metalmark butterfly is an endangered species, but there is a butterfly that looks almost exactly like it living elsewhere in the country and doing fairly well.  That other butterfly is not a very close genetic relation to the Lange's.  The Lange's closest genetic relative looks nothing like it, actually, though genetically, they are almost twins. And the other one?  Also not endangered.  So... what makes the Lange's so special that it gets status?  Not its looks, because there's another butterfly that looks just like it that is not endangered.  And not its genes, as it has a pretty close relative that is not endangered.  Hmm...

This was such a wonderful, beautifully written book about peoples' relationships with animals over time, and how difficult the issues are that surround conservation today.  Is it worth saving a species if the habitat they live in is doomed?  Should we allow animals to rely on humans for survival to help  save a species or should we be hands off?  How "wild" should we expect animals to be when control so many aspects of their lives?  And should we be trying to save a few, "important" species, or should we concentrate on ensuring that the pockets of the world all of us live in are as biologically diverse as possible?  These are all difficult questions to answer.  Mooallem doesn't attempt to answer any of them, but tells us so many stories to illustrate how we have struggled with this for so long, and continue to struggle with it.  Wild Ones is a wonderful homage to conservation struggles in America, full of personal stories and historical anecdotes and shot through with so much wistfulness it can be hard not to cry.  Highly recommended.

The culture shock of coming home after war

I have a general goal of reading Alan Allport's Demobbed:  Coming Home After World War II and Julie Summers' Stranger in the House in a close enough time frame to each other that I can get both the soldier POV and the home front POV and compare and contrast the two.  I've now read the first book, so just need to get myself together enough to read Stranger in the House within the next few months.

I've had Demobbed on my shelf for a couple of years now, having purchased it when I was on a kick about learning more about the after-effects of WWII on people's lives.  Some time ago, I read and really enjoyed Soldier from the War Returning, which focuses on American men coming home after WWII.  Demobbed focuses on British soldiers and their families attempting to return to civilian life after six years of war.  It talks through the whole demobilization plan, the efforts to get everyone employed, and the difficulty of picking up a life that had been on pause for so long.

End of Year Review-itas

I've gotten through more books than expected over the past couple of weeks.  One of them, A Tale for the Time Being, is worthy of its own post, but for those below - I just don't have a ton to say, so I shall combine my comments into one post for them.

The Republic of Thieves, by Scott Lynch:  I was excited to hear that Scott Lynch's latest installment in the Gentlemen Bastards series was finally out. I enjoyed The Lies of Locke Lamora, though I didn't love Red Seas Under Red Skies. The Republic of Thieves got off to a promising start, with all the quick wit and fantastic one-liners that really set the series apart from a lot of fantasy novels.

But it often felt as though Lynch put a lot more effort into crafting a carefully worded insult or bizarre analogy than into fleshing out the characters themselves. I got tired of all the clever banter and just wanted a plot that interested me. And honestly, there was SO MUCH DRAMA between Locke and his lady love Sabetha that I spent half the book rolling my eyes.  The two of them were so annoying, and I don't think they had much chemistry at all, though clearly Locke thinks they do.  Sabetha - who knows?  I stopped  caring after the first scene they were in together.  So rather than being excited to FINALLY meet Sabetha (for whom there was so much foreshadowing in the first two books of the series), I just dreaded any scene of the two of them together - every one would inevitably end with Sabetha taking offense and Locke groveling for her forgiveness. Ugh. No thank you.

The Third Coast:  When Chicago Built the American Dream, by Thomas Dyja, was a pretty depressing read.  It sounds very positive - America!  Dreams!  Chicago!  But it really isn't very happy at all.  As a Chicagoan, this disappointed me, but I also appreciated Dyja's very honest portrayal of my home city.  Chicago has always been known for having a very corrupt local government, and it also gained a lot of notoriety for race riots during the mid-20th century.  But it also has one of the world's most beautiful skylines, miles and miles of public lakefront property, amazing city parks and a very impressive cultural scene for a smaller city.

But, apparently, all of this was gained through an appalling system of racism, displacement, and terrifyingly horrible mismanagement.  Also, because of Mayor Richard Daley.

A lot is covered in this book, from Mies Van der Rohe's architectural aesthetic and how the Illinois Institute of Technology steamrolled entire neighborhoods to grow under Van der Rohe's guidance to Nelson Algren's sordid affair with Simone de Beauvoir and his one-hit wonder, The Man with the Golden Arm.  From the short, golden age of Chicago film and TV to the brutal murder of Emmitt Till.  There is so much here, and the overwhelming message is - Chicago is a great city, but it could have been so much greater.  And that's hard to swallow as a lifelong Chicagoan.  But it's also so important to understand your home's history and culture and how it came to be what it is now.  And just how much work there is to be done to make it better.

I read Shannon Hale's The Goose Girl on audiobook.  It was my first childen's audiobook and it was interesting to hear all of the music, the full cast of characters, and the very different intonations that the cast used vs what they would have for an adult reading of the book. 

I became interested in The Goose Girl after I read Thorn, a different retelling of the fairy tale.  At first, I was a little concerned with the similarities between Khanani's story and Hale's.  In both, the princess is lonely, doesn't really get along with her siblings, and is basically ignored by her mother.  She also becomes an advocate for the common people when she moves to a new kingdom.  But luckily, the books were different enough that I was able to enjoy the story once more.

I really enjoy Shannon Hale's writing, and this book was no exception.  Ani is a very nice person and the book is about her coming into her own and making friends.  It's not about her romance with the prince.  I really enjoyed that.  However, the book did feel young to me, particularly when compared with Khanani's novel, which was rich with complexity, gray areas, and many wonderful characters.

I think in future, I'll be reading many more fairy tale retellings!  I do love them, and just how rich a story a gifted author can create out of just a few pages of inspiration.

 Sandra Gulland's Mistress of the Sun has been on my shelf since it was first published.  I LOVED Gulland's Josephine Bonaparte trilogy and was so excited to get my hands on this one, too.  But not excited enough to actually read it until very recently.

Mistress of the Sun is about Louise de Valliere, a young woman sent to the court of Louis XIV (the Sun King) and becomes his mistress.  I was really hoping for a deeply personal account that also highlighted all of the goings-on at the court itself (such as the Affair of the Poisons!).  But instead, I spent a lot of time reading about Louise's relationship with horses (which I did not really care about at all) and about how guilty she felt about sleeping with the King (but it felt oh so good, too!).  I didn't think she was a strong enough character to carry the whole novel, and I didn't really like any of the other characters, either.  No one seemed to really like each other, and so the reader was always at a distance from everyone in the whole novel.  There were no real friendships at all.

I did appreciate the insight Gulland gave us into court life - it seemed rather tedious when it wasn't teeming with intrigue.  And all of the superstitions and home remedies they had for things were quite fun to read about, when not terrifying.

The book did remind me that I have Anne Somerset's The Affair of the Poisons on my bookshelf to read, so maybe some time in 2014, I will read that one :-)

I'll be off now until the new year, which I'll kick off with a 2013 Year in Review post.  Best wishes for a happy holiday week and a fantastic start to 2014!

Joint Musings: Parasite Rex

Carl Zimmer's Parasite Rex has been on my TBR list for a while.  It first came to my attention when Ana reviewed it some years ago.  And now that  I am a podcast junkie, I've heard Zimmer on lots of science-y podcasts, and he is always very engaging and so passionate about the topics he discusses.

But reading about parasites can be a daunting task, and I never pulled the book off my shelf.  Until just recently, when Lu and I decided to read it together.  I'm so glad we did because this is the sort of book that really wows you with its facts and history, and you need someone with whom to share your "OMG" moments.

Lu and I had a really fun discussion about the book.  You can find the first half of our chat over at her blog.  And the second half is right here!  Don't be scared off by the cover.  The book has some slow parts, but overall, it is fascinating!

[continued from Lu's blog]

Leslie: It seems a little scary, to be honest! I think something has to be done, but a lot of these ecological problems are because of new species being introduced into the environment and wreaking havoc. So to introduce another organism to fight it seems like it could also have dire consequences on the ecosystem.  It’s very exciting when it works and it’s cutting edge science that’s truly amazing, but I did come away from the book being worried about what would happen if it went wrong.

I was also fascinated by the way parasites can manipulate other creatures. Right after I finished Parasite Rex, I read a news article about an isopod that takes over as a fish’s tongue. It first eats the tongue and then performs the function of the tongue until it can raise its young. Then, when the young are released, the parasite and the host fish both die. I mean, what?! How is this possible?

Aarti:  I read that article, too!  I don’t know how they can do it, either.  It is SO SCARY.  I obviously am now terrified that who knows WHAT is consuming my innards at any and all moments now.  The book has really affected me!  I’ll just be reading or listening to the radio or something and somehow, something will relate back to parasites!  For example, I am reading A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki, and in it, one of the characters describes being bullied at school as though she is the slow water buffalo in a pack and the hyenas are stalking her out as their prey.  And I was like, “Ooh, maybe that animal has a parasite that ultimately wants to end up in a hyena, not a water buffalo!”

Leslie: Even though the science occasionally went over my head, I really think that this is the kind of nonfiction that gets you excited for a topic you never really knew you had an interest in. I had a couple of people remark when I was reading it that it seemed too scary, like all they’d be able to think about were parasites when they were done reading. I mostly just found it fascinating, though, and I think it’s written in such a way that it’s accessible for everyone, without being too terrifying!

Aarti:  I agree.  And while I don’t think the book is so scary that it will make you think about parasites all the time, it will probably be one of those books that will be recalled to mind at random times because it touched on so many different and interesting aspects of how life evolves on this planet!