Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship
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Books:
4-stars-and-a-half
(90)
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| 0593237145
| 9780593237144
| 0593237145
| 4.63
| 3,022
| Mar 25, 2025
| Mar 25, 2025
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it was amazing
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This book is so important. It is the Evicted of the 2020s, and I hope it gets that level of attention because it is certainly deserved. It focuses in
This book is so important. It is the Evicted of the 2020s, and I hope it gets that level of attention because it is certainly deserved. It focuses in on a massive issue that we all need to be talking more about: the skyrocking housing costs that are squeezing many lower-income people in the U.S. out of housing altogether… in some cases, because wages aren’t keeping up with costs, even those with full-time jobs. The book’s primary focus is storytelling, following 5 families in Atlanta—all with children, mostly headed by single mothers, although in one case even a family with two working parents gets caught up in this nightmare. Their journeys through losing and gaining and losing housing again illustrate all different facets of the problem, all with top-notch storytelling that will get the reader invested. Some of the many topics addressed: • Lack of affordable housing, especially in places that are gentrifying; lots of new construction is happening but generally higher-end, while owners of lower-rent properties have an incentive to sell out. • Landlords unwilling to work with the Section 8 voucher program, so that even people who are supposed to get their rent subsidized can’t find anyone to accept the subsidy (mostly because the government expects rents to be reasonable and inspects the properties). I thought this was an isolated problem but it turns out almost 2/3 of the vouchers issued in Atlanta during this time period went unused because no one would accept them. • Apartment complexes that got tax breaks in exchange for being affordable finding loopholes to end affordability early and sell out. • Conditions in affordable housing are also a serious problem (this is apparently especially true in Georgia, one of three states that doesn’t even require rented homes to be habitable, but really it’s a problem everywhere that demand for affordable housing exceeds supply). • Landlords often charge exorbitant fees—for applications, for instance—which can be a major expense for people who get denied repeatedly due to poor credit, past evictions, etc. • Credit scores aren’t fairly calculated either; making timely rent and utility payments for years does nothing to improve your score, while an eviction will tank it. • Extended-stay hotels often wind up as the place of last resort for those who have lost their housing (many stay for years, often with none of the protections of a tenant). They tend to be seedy and even dangerous, in poor repair, and meanwhile charge so much for a single room (which often houses an entire family) that people already priced out of housing can’t save enough to move elsewhere. • Couch-surfing can work for people with a strong support system, but puts a serious strain on relationships and is highly unstable. • As a last resort, many people wind up living out of their cars. But try getting a full night’s sleep in a car, especially with kids and inhospitable temperatures outdoors. • Transition programs for the homeless can help, if bureaucratic requirements don’t render them impracticable, but short-term rental assistance only goes so far. Programs aimed at helping the homeless tend to be based in dated and inaccurate, but politically convenient, notions that homelessness is primarily caused by individual mental health problems rather than economic forces. • Rooming houses are another potential option, but the one shown here is financially exploitative and in terrible condition (apparently, this is not uncommon). • Through it all, most programs aimed at the homeless really just mean people on the streets, excluding most of those without housing. • Being homeless itself takes a toll, and going through it can cause addiction or mental health problems—not to mention the toll that growing up this way takes on kids. This isn’t a policy text, though—the book is very much grounded in the individual stories of the families, each a bit different from the others, offering big-picture information when it is helpful for context while letting readers see how it all plays out in the lives of actual people. While Goldstone exclusively follows families in Atlanta, where he lives, it all rings very true to my area as well (our laws aren’t as asinine as Georgia’s on tenant protection, but this seems to make less difference than you might think). My biggest reservation about the book is that Goldstone’s writing himself out of it, when he was spending a lot of time with these families, is a bit misleading. There is perhaps no perfect way to do this in journalistic nonfiction (highly present authors tend to be distracting and annoying), but his involvement in their lives and presence at key moments must have had an influence. It also would’ve been nice to know what happened to these people once his reporting was over and he felt free to help them. Overall, though, this is a great book to read for awareness of a pressing issue and for empathy with the people facing it. One of the women profiled, in particular, can be difficult in ways anyone working with the public will have encountered—she can be paranoid and belligerent—but Goldstone writes about her with a great deal of empathy and curiosity about what she’s going through, so you get a full picture of her life and why she sometimes acts this way. That said, the affordable housing problem is so big that several families in the book fall into it while doing nothing wrong. As long as rents are beyond what people can afford while working relatively low-wage jobs—in restaurants, call centers, day cares, customer service, warehouses, etc.—this will continue. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 22, 2025
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Sep 27, 2025
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Jul 31, 2025
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Hardcover
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| 1982190248
| 9781982190248
| 1982190248
| 4.33
| 3,381
| Feb 18, 2025
| Feb 18, 2025
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it was amazing
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4.5 stars I ate this book up, both because it provides a fascinating look into the lives of popular women writers in the 18th century, and for the comm 4.5 stars I ate this book up, both because it provides a fascinating look into the lives of popular women writers in the 18th century, and for the commentary on their books. For years I have been looking for a critical book about what becomes a classic and what doesn’t: tracing the careers of books through the centuries, seeing where their reputations are boosted or where they are dropped from the canon, loudly or quietly. So I was especially excited about this part, and although the portions on rare book dealing and collecting interested me less, it was still a peek into a world I knew nothing about. In general the nine authors profiled had fascinating lives, and I’m now interested in giving many of their works a shot as well. I do suspect Romney of being a very generous reader, quite understandably since she came to these works with both low expectations and the desire to be pleased; she only disliked one writer (whom Austen probably did too), and otherwise thinks they were unfairly dropped from the canon. Of course, what is great is ultimately subjective, and if Jane Austen thought these writers were great—the amount of evidence varies, but most of them she clearly did think were great—that’s a strong recommendation. It’s interesting that Romney points to male writers from the period, such as Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, and Laurence Sterne, having fared far better than the women. I wonder how much of that is specific to academia, as this does not seem to be borne out on Goodreads (at least when compared to the more popular of the women, such as Burney and Radcliffe). Also, all 18th century British writers—even Defoe, whose Robinson Crusoe blows the others out of the water in number of ratings—get mediocre averages. Does this support the conventional wisdom that 18th century novels just don’t hold up well today, while Austen was a genius pioneering the modern novel? But how to separate the authors’ relative merits from their cultural standing, when nobody comes to Austen blind? The question of how the canon should be defined is perhaps a riddle with no answer. But a major takeaway from this book is that it is not an automatic process, but one highly dependent on the tastes of influential readers. And once a book is dropped from the canon, however specious the reasons, it’s hard to bring back—pre-internet, almost impossible, because going out of print meant few people could read it even if they wanted to! At any rate, some notes on the authors discussed: Jane Austen: During her time, she was considered more “among the best in her genre” than “grand master.” Her reputation grew after her death, however, with some key interventions mostly by influential men: in 1870, when interest was beginning to wane, her nephew published an important memoir of her; he and her brother both skillfully portrayed her as the perfect Victorian angel. Other male professors and critics also championed her books, then leading to many adaptations, all of which has kept her work in the canon and the public eye. Frances Burney: Was both wildly popular and renowned in her time, and one of the authors Austen most looked up to. She seems to have fallen out of the canon in part because her work was deemed too similar to Austen’s by male taste-makers with limited interest in young women’s lives, and who were happy with just one token woman on the list. Romney makes good points about not pitting female authors against each other in this sort of zero-sum game; she ranks Burney’s Evelina below Pride and Prejudice but above some of Austen’s other work, and notes that while her writing was less subtle than Austen’s, she was more willing to confront unsavory aspects of life. Romney also theorizes that infantilizing Burney by calling her “Fanny” (when she did not use her nickname professionally) didn’t help, and that growing interest in her as a diarist didn’t either, though the latter confuses me, as it still raises her profile. Personally, I suspect the sheer length of Burney’s books (her shortest are about on par with Austen’s longest) is a factor, along with their epistolary format. Ann Radcliffe: Popularizer of gothics, also both wildly popular and critically acclaimed in her own day. Her work seems to have suffered for a couple of reasons: first because it had a slew of lower-quality imitators, and while her contemporaries held her clearly above them, later on they got lumped together, while the gothic genre (popular with women) lost prestige. Radcliffe’s personal low profile didn’t help: around the time Austen’s nephew wrote his memoir, Christina Rossetti set out to write a biography of Radcliffe, but couldn’t find material. Romney also loved The Mysteries of Udolpho and defends it hard, in ways I didn’t entirely buy. The connection of the 18th century heroine’s constant fainting with her lacking the option to say “no” is an interesting one. But a protagonist regularly losing consciousness in dramatic moments remains a pulpy trope, and I do think genre work ages more quickly in general (hence, the pacing being difficult for modern readers). But Romney’s point about Radcliffe having far more influence on later genre writers than she’s given credit for is still an important one. Charlotte Lennox: This woman had a bold and wild life: arriving alone in England as a teenager and immediately getting aristocratic patronage as a poet was just the beginning. It’s less clear why her work fell out of fashion: perhaps because daring to critique Shakespeare lost her a lot of fans, or maybe because she tried her hand at many things rather than having a clear “brand.” But I’m interested in trying The Female Quixote. Hannah More: Mostly a moralist and philanthropist. While she wrote a highly moralizing novel that was popular at the time, Jane Austen probably didn’t like it and Romney didn’t either, mostly using this chapter to draw an interesting comparison between the mores of 18th century evangelicals and those of the Mormon community Romney herself grew up in. More did manage to get set up for life by suing a guy for wasting her best years in an engagement and then failing to marry her, which sounds like a good deal to me. Charlotte Turner Smith: This chapter is mostly focused on the author’s life, which is well-deserved: she had to write her way to independence from a terrible marriage. From the sound of it her novels were geared more at money-making than literary quality (and making them as long as possible meant more money). In a literary sense she was a bigger deal as a poet, but her work was later forgotten. Elizabeth Inchbald: Primarily a playwright, who wrote the play performed in Mansfield Park. Romney found her humor to hold up very well, her tendency to hammer home the morals less so. Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi: The only nonfiction writer on the list. Her life is an interesting one, and her friendship with Samuel Johnson plus male contemporaries’ obsession with how terrible it was for her to marry a lower-class, Italian man after her first husband’s death seems to overshadow all other facts about her in many accounts. All this tended to preclude serious consideration of her work. Maria Edgeworth: This section disappointed me a bit compared to the others, since Edgeworth is a big deal and one of the authors I knew of. She seems to have fallen out of the canon after getting pigeonholed as an “Irish” writer, thus being less “universal” (which is of course ridiculous and really a matter of privilege: Austen, after all, is extremely English). At any rate, the book was a fascinating read and I do plan to check out several of the writers on this list. I am not sure I will like them as much as Romney did, but as she points out, sometimes it’s important to judge for yourself rather than allowing the critic of 100 years ago to make it for you. And this is especially true with female writers, whose work has often been dismissed—in many of these cases, even after being renowned for decades, or even a century. But I loved reading about these writers and their work, appreciate Romney’s highlighting of them, and would love to read more books like this! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 23, 2025
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Mar 28, 2025
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Feb 27, 2025
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Hardcover
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| 1250266165
| 9781250266163
| 1250266165
| 4.13
| 1,051
| Mar 15, 2022
| Mar 15, 2022
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really liked it
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4.5 stars An informative, accessible and compelling study of life and politics in today’s Venezuela, from a journalist who spent several years in the c 4.5 stars An informative, accessible and compelling study of life and politics in today’s Venezuela, from a journalist who spent several years in the country. It takes as its focal point the blackouts of 2019: the point at which the country had deteriorated so much (economically and in terms of functionality of services and living conditions) that the government couldn’t even keep the lights on. Rather than a chronological account, the book circles back to the same events several times, but in a way that generally reinforces and adds context to the previous bits rather than confusing them. Early on we get more human-interest stories of regular people’s lives, later some economic analysis, and then a higher-level look at the politics in both Venezuela and the U.S. that led to this situation. I found it all very engaging despite the often bleak subject matter. Neuman interviews people from diverse walks of life, from slumdwellers to hotel managers to the guy who unsuccessfully declared himself president and the U.S. diplomats and analysts involved. And he travels around the country to get a sense of different places (while the cities are struggling, the mining areas are nightmarish). There’s also a lot of economic and political analysis, which is digestible for the casual reader. Neuman notes that Venezuela’s economy was mostly strong under Chavez, because China’s development meant oil was priced high; Venezuela became entirely dependent on a single commodity whose price later fell, while squandering much of the money that came in with projects that looked good on TV but were often never finished and provided no benefit to the people (Neuman calls it “fauxcialism” at one point). Chavez’s government also allowed people to swindle the government left and right. Businesspeople took massive advantage of currency policies and only pretended to import things, while key positions depended on cronyism rather than competence. Everything got worse under Chavez’s successor, Maduro, who doubled down on autocratic tendencies as the economy got worse. The coup de grace happened when the first Trump administration jumped straight to last-resort sanctions in order to look tough on leftist Latin American governments for Cuban-American voters in Florida—then the Biden administration didn’t lift them, for the same reason. Meanwhile Venezuela’s opposition is a clown show that seems to hope that if it gestures hard enough, someone else will swoop in to solve its problems. But I appreciated that this doesn’t just turn into a policy paper. Even in the analysis it focuses on specifics and on interviews with people involved, and it also follows the lives of people who are working to survive and take care of their families. I did wish for a few pictures, especially as Neuman emphasizes the physical beauty of the country! I do see the criticisms of Neuman’s politics as very middle-of-the-road, though perhaps that’s helpful in a journalist, and dealing with extreme and foolish governments in both Venezuela and the U.S. means he pretty much criticizes everybody. In the end I don’t know what he believes, but I also don’t know that it matters—his purpose is to share factual analysis of what went wrong. (Also his tangent about how Venezuelans refer to electricity as “light” while Americans call it “power” suggests he hasn’t met many low-income Americans, but okay.) In the end, I certainly learned from this book and found it very engaging reading. A strong and thorough work of journalism that should be worthwhile for anyone interested in Venezuela. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 23, 2025
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Feb 27, 2025
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Jan 04, 2025
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Hardcover
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| 1250238900
| 9781250238900
| 1250238900
| 3.72
| 9,472
| Feb 11, 2020
| Feb 11, 2020
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it was amazing
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4.5 stars I loved this, actually. It’s a fun adventure fantasy that is nonetheless well-written and takes risks with structure. It’s a wildly inventive 4.5 stars I loved this, actually. It’s a fun adventure fantasy that is nonetheless well-written and takes risks with structure. It’s a wildly inventive world (or perhaps I should say universe, as it’s a bit of a high fantasy/space opera mashup), but nonetheless remains grounded in strong character work. The settings are often dark, but it excels at humor. It actually succeeds at villain POVs that aren’t boring—they keep you guessing, with some unexpected twists and turns. Best of all, I was genuinely emotionally invested in the characters, and this is my new favorite f/f romance. Rather than focusing on lust, it makes the reader fall in love with the love interest (who is adorable and must be protected), while the protagonist bumbles about performing acts of service without quite understanding why (which is also adorable). I know there is a sequel, but this one wraps up so well that it is fully satisfying as a standalone novel. My one criticism is that it can feel a little tropey, the world perhaps a little less than lived-in. But it’s high-quality fun that fully pulled me in. Recommended. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 17, 2024
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Jan 05, 2025
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Sep 12, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 0385544766
| 9780385544764
| 0385544766
| 4.46
| 19,223
| Apr 09, 2024
| Apr 09, 2024
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really liked it
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4.5 stars A very thoroughly-researched and entertaining work of narrative history, this is an account of Captain Cook’s third voyage, in which his crew 4.5 stars A very thoroughly-researched and entertaining work of narrative history, this is an account of Captain Cook’s third voyage, in which his crew visited most of the world’s continents, were probably the first Europeans to find Hawai’i, mapped the coastline of Alaska and laid to rest the idea of the Northwest Passage. It’s an engaging saga and well told, and Sides is clearly well-informed, taking the time to fill in the context of scientific issues not yet understood at the time, or the consequences of some of Cook’s actions (such as letting European rats off his ship on Pacific Islands. They proved to be a devastatingly invasive species). Sides also handles the thornier issues around colonialism well, including information and perspectives from Native histories and oral histories, and not simply following the Eurocentric assumptions of his most prominent sources. One of the objectives of the voyage was to return a Tahitian man named Mai to his homeland, and the book spends a lot of time following Mai’s journey as well. It’s interesting to see the ways that the 18th centuries explorers—who were not themselves attempting to conquer or colonize anyone, but whose voyages paved the way for that—come across as much more open-minded and progressive than their 19th century successors (Dalrymple observed the same about the British in India). Cook certainly recorded reflections that seem (from a modern perspective of assuming continuous progress) ahead of his time, opining that European visitors only introduced disease and deserved the peace, and doubting anyone could tell him “what the natives of the whole extent of America have gained by the commerce they have had with the Europeans.” However, despite his openness to different cultural practices and concern about the spread of venereal disease, he had an increasing tendency to respond violently to what he perceived as stealing, which ultimately got him killed after hurting a lot of other people along the way. Sides handles these issues with nuance and in a way that, refreshingly, does not feel aimed at social media. Unsurprisingly from a biographer, he does tend toward defending Cook at times, but more around his missing major geographical features than behavior toward indigenous people. Overall, I really enjoyed this book; it is informative, immersive, and compelling storytelling. The average rating seems rather absurdly high and I would not go so far as to call it the best history I have ever read, but probably top 10%. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 07, 2025
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Mar 15, 2025
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Jun 16, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 0593447573
| 9780593447574
| 0593447573
| 3.88
| 2,192
| May 07, 2024
| May 07, 2024
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really liked it
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4.5 stars I loved this one, and I don’t usually like memoirs in essays; this example felt more cohesive than most, perhaps because only a couple of the 4.5 stars I loved this one, and I don’t usually like memoirs in essays; this example felt more cohesive than most, perhaps because only a couple of the chapters were published independently. It’s a memoir of the author’s life through the lens of her friendships with other girls and women, and does a great job of centering friendship while also exploring its complexity. Dancyger’s writing is strong and compelling, and she brings her friends to life as individuals, in a way that is respectful and shows what she loves about them without seeming overly idealized. She also deals thoughtfully with difficult issues, having lost close friends to both murder and suicide. And she has had a wild life, which was always interesting to read about—I think as a writer she is enamored of the badassery of her backstory, but, well, why not, and many of her feelings and relationships are relatable even if your life has been nothing like hers. The chapters focused on pop culture did less for me, however, and sometimes the conclusions can feel a little pat. But that’s mostly noticeable because it’s the exception rather than the rule, and overall this is a great choice if you’re interested in a thoughtful and deeply felt celebration of friendship. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 20, 2025
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Feb 22, 2025
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May 02, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 0871404850
| 9780871404855
| 0871404850
| 4.25
| 7,679
| 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 |
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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
| 3,369
| 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
| 4.08
| 587
| 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
| 4.09
| 12,038
| 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
| 4.33
| 1,562
| Sep 10, 1982
| 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
| 3.70
| 5,875
| 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
| 4.10
| 14,456
| 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
| 4.28
| 13,852
| 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 |
Notes are private!
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1
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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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Paperback
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| 1250272858
| 9781250272850
| 1250272858
| 4.25
| 5,008
| 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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1
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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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Hardcover
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| 0393541770
| 9780393541779
| 0393541770
| 4.26
| 1,773
| 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 |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 2023
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Jan 08, 2023
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Jul 31, 2022
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Hardcover
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| B0DSZW9HPZ
| 4.26
| 148,971
| May 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 |
Notes are private!
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1
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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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Paperback
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| 0316450847
| 9780316450843
| 0316450847
| 3.56
| 17,977
| 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 |
Notes are private!
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1
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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
| 3,225
| 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 |
Notes are private!
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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
| 4.14
| 1,149
| 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 |
Notes are private!
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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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