Suzie
I like Mark Manson's blog. And there are some good ideas in this book. But, unfortunately, his book is remarkably tone deaf and really quite sexist.
He talks about unreliable memory. But his example of unreliable memory... is a woman with a false memory of sexual abuse. He talks about the importance of being honest with people. But his example of him being an honest and trustworthy partner he is... is him telling his wife she looks like shit.
This is a book written for young fairly privileged men. And so it is unfortunate that when he talks about a victim mentality he mocks college life ‘safe spaces'... and not men who attack women for playing video games or complain about comic books pandering to the PC police.
It's a shame he spends time talking about men jailed because of false rape accusations but never mentions men killing women because they falsely believed they were cheating.
The truth is, he conflates the inevitable trauma and grief that is a part of all human life, with the systematic trauma and oppression that comes about from living under a patriarchal, capitalist system. This system is designed to remove people's agency and ability to choose. You can't respond to it in the same way that you respond to individual loss, like the death of a close friend. One requires collective action, the other requires individual responsibility. And this book does not recognise the difference between the two, and chooses instead to hype up individualism at every step.
Malala cannot single-handledly dismantle the Taliban, however much we love our hero narrative. We all have choice and responsibility, it's true. What Mark misses, is the fact that those of us with more agency and privilege need to step up and take responsibility for the safety of other people as well. Not by taking part in a co-dependent relationship, but by examining and dismantling the systems that keep some people powerless and other people overpowered.
What's most interesting to me are the ideas that More assumes as default (slavery, capital punishment, men as the head of the family) which nowadays we would probably not include as part of our description of utopia.
What assumptions do we make about ‘the natural order of things' or ‘human nature' that will one day be considered barbaric?
I can't really understand what this novel was trying to do. It's exaggerated pantomime at times, but undercuts the humour and ‘fun' kinky-swashbuckling stuff with some realistic violence (including an unnecessary and graphic rape scene) which results in an atonal mess. There's the seed of a good book here, but it's in desperate need of an editor.
This is one of the worst ‘pseudo-science' books I have ever read. She criticises ‘Big Pharma' for using studies with small sample sizes and for failing to control for placebo effects – but then the studies she posts as sources for her truly outrageous claims are so completely flawed it's hard to know where to begin in criticising them.
I was hoping for a book that explained some of the science behind depression, and had some of the studies of the recent links between the microbiome and mental health. What I got was an angry, controversy theorists' rantings about the evils of antidepressants, antibiotics, statins, vaccines and painkillers.
Her healing ‘plan' seems to be a version of whole30/paleo, with some meditation and exercise thrown in. Though, disclaimer, I quit this book 40% of the way through because I just couldn't take any more.
The essays were interesting (if ad-hoc – there was no sense of organisation or theme, instead it just felt like reading a blog with a selection of random but interesting posts) but the kindle version had no images and when reading an essay about a particular design or designer or building... you really do want to see it!
