Angela Ambroz
Argh, my eyes. What is it about this period in history, these famous physicists, that inspires the most crazy, far-out stories? I refer specifically to Lydia Millet's Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, which is another insane Manhattan Project-derived sci fi/fantasy... thing.
Unfortunately, I just didn't enjoy this comix. In fact, it felt like the second half of Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, when the novel just falls apart, gratuitous carnage abounds, and the characters don't make any sense to me. This is kind of like that. It combines (uncomfortably, for me) a sort of rampant cynicism (all the characters are either pathetic or cruel or disgusting or all of the above) with gleeful stupidity (the aliens... sigh...).
I wanted smart commentary about, you know, the whole “our technology outstripping our moral capacity” thing. The whole “we're gonna blow ourselves up” thing. Oppenheimer, Fermi, Einstein, etc. are such interesting figures! Here they become inscrutably, monstrously silly.
So as not to completely bash this (since it's not terrible, it just wasn't for me), I did enjoy the Feynman excerpts, I can rationally admire the inventiveness of the plot (which takes many sharp turns), and I can also say that there are some very clever curlicues: e.g. the “Cast of Characters”, with its changing epithets. Even though I don't necessarily AGREE where they're taking this story, I can say they're skillful storytellers.
I have somehow found myself in the sub-sub-sub-genre of intellectual/philosophical biographical comix. And I am fine with that!
This is an interesting, meditative, and infuriating part-memoir about the author, whose father was a big Joycean scholar, and Lucia Joyce, the ill-fated daughter of James. There are many parallels between these two womens' lives: namely, their dads... how can I put this kindly... okay, I can't, I'm just so angry... Okay, the main parallel is the FRICKIN PATRIARCHY crushing them oppressively all the damn time.
I had no idea about Lucia Joyce, and I find James Joyce (and Joycean studies?) kind of insufferable. So this just made me even more annoyed with that whole lot.
Three stories blended together: a straightforward, heartachey tale of middle school trials and tribs, where a Chinese-American kid doesn't want his Chinese heritage; a monkey king who doesn't wanna be a monkey; and a surreal, faux sitcom featuring an all-American, WASPy teenager, Danny, who is constantly embarrassed by his AWFUL, caricature-of-a-racist-stereotype Chinese cousin, Chin-Kee.
The ending felt a little too abrupt for me, and the weaving together of the three stories was a little so-so. It was definitely an unexpected resolution, and clever. But it also felt a little deus ex machina - actually, I guess it was a literal DEM.
The art was blunt, flat, bright and straightforward. Not as crazily complex and hallucinatory as Habibi, nor as delicate in gesture and tone as The Nao of Brown. I enjoyed the art in those two books a lot more. But American Born Chinese's art is fine, even if uninspiring.
I was pretty skeptical about this book, since it seemed to reek of two things I find generally disturbing: a “parenting philosophy” and Francophilia. So it took me a while to get to this. But I'm glad I did! It was a hugely calming, sanity-inducing look at parenting small children. It's a lovely antidote and inoculation against some of the “cult of total motherhood” insanities around how children are meant to radically transform your identity, your life, and your freedom - an idea that seems increasingly fashionable these days on (mostly/entirely Anglo?) blogs, forums, baby tracking apps, etc. An idea that made me wonder why anyone in their right mind would choose to have kids?!
Jennifer's review hits the nail on the head. This book is basically a “traditionalist” view of babies and small children. The parents are in charge, kids mold to parents' lives (not vice versa), and - as one European relative told me - “we would put the baby in its own room, close the door to his room and to our room, and only return when his screams were loud enough to be heard in our room”. This basically goes against the grain of Dr. Sears-style “attachment parenting”, and indeed, if you believe in the higher powers of baby-wearing, exclusive breastfeeding, co-sleeping, etc., then you will probably be annoyed by this book - much shade is thrown.
One good (and common) critique of this book is that it's not that French parenting wisdom is superior to American parenting wisdom, it's that French institutions - paid maternity leave, free childcare, subsidized everything - are superior to American institutions. Yeah. Duh. The American state (or rather, the Republican Party) doesn't seem to believe that women have anything to offer beyond their uteruses and boobs, and there is an enormous institutional apparatus making it hard and miserable to be a parent and a worker while female. So you have working women having to cobble together maternity leave using sick leave and vacation days, pumping breast milk in supply closets. I mean, it's bonkers.
But it's also true that American parenting - especially American motherhood - seems to be consumed by ideological warfare (boob or formula? unmedicated birth or epidural?!), incredibly loaded with judgement and pseudo-science, in a way that other countries are not. And I do think this is a reaction to the messed up institutions. I mean, there's an entire industry of “how to get your baby to sleep X hours by Y age” - and an entire morbid cultural meme around how horrific newborn sleep patterns are - and I really think the only reason everyone is so darkly obsessed with BABY NIGHTTIME SLEEP OH GLOB is because at least one, but often both, parents need to be back to working at the office ASAP.
Another big motivator behind American's obsessive, all-consuming hyperparenting culture is not just the crappy institutions, but also the crappy income inequality. See this interesting WaPo article. I think it's in that article, but there's a stat somewhere about how working moms now spend as much time - per week - on childcare as STAY AT HOME moms did in the 70s.
Anyway, this book is nice. It's inspiring, despite these structural nonsenses. I mean, you don't HAVE to buy into the parenting rat race, even if the institutions and culture are pushing it. I especially liked the “French parenting wisdom” of treating your children NOT as tiny fragile avatars or tiny projects to perfect, but as individuals possessing of (some modicum of) rationality and resilience.
O YA and the book includes a couple recipes! Delightful. Apparently weekend baking is a big “parental wisdom” thing French parents do with their children starting at some early age (2 years old!? I dunno). Who doesn't like cake? Druckerman includes a recipe for a yogurt cake that is apparently the go-to starter cake for these tiny pastry chefs.
How could anyone not love - nay, ADORE - these simple, playful, joyous, plump and VERY LARGE babies? Racial diversity - yes, thank you. Extremely short for extremely short attention spans - yes. Featuring such delights as mud, bathtime, combing your hair, and tickles? Wonderful. Honestly, I just love Helen Oxenbury's art.
Really, really enjoyed this light, speedy, semi-biographical account about three very interesting women: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikas (who I didn't know about before). They are apparently known as the “Trimates”. I appreciated learning about the strange passion these women lived their lives by - Goodall and Fossey had no formal training in primatology, but were just SUPER INTO chimps and gorillas, respectively.
I appreciated how the darkness and problematic aspects of their circumstances and their work and their personalities was also quietly and unassumingly displayed. For example, I had no idea who Louis Leakey was - but he was integral to “selecting” all three women for their fieldwork. Mostly because he believed women “are better at being patient” and also cuz he was a philanderer!?
This comix, like all good biographical comix, made me very excited to read more and learn more about these women. As well as extremely excited to learn more about primates!
Oh, this one got me right in the heart.
I knew nothing of Annie Sullivan, the young woman who was Helen Keller's lifelong teacher. This is a short biographical comix about Sullivan, who had a very difficult life indeed. Told with gentleness, humanity, and care, we jump back and forth between Sullivan's work with a very young Helen Keller, to Sullivan's own childhood in a western Massachusetts poorhouse.
The book could have had larger font and less cramped panel ordering, or maybe I'm just getting old. But, really, a phenomenal story.
Not at all what I usually read, and thus - a refreshing change! I give this probably 4.5/5.
A meditative look at mortality, history and life (LIFE) through the eyes of a dying elderly woman, Claudia. Claudia is an intellectual firebrand and narcissist living in the first half of the 20th century; not always likable, but that's fine. The book swims with a weird (beautifully written!) stream of consciousness as we drift from Claudia as an old dying woman in 1980s England to Claudia as a young war reporter in 1940s Egypt to Claudia's fractured, aloof motherhood. It's good! The writing walks a very strong purple line; let's say I found it a pleasant lavender, though your mileage may vary.
Central to Claudia's life is her too-brief romance with an English soldier, Tom, stationed in Egypt,. This was kind of the standard “doomed love in the souq” sub-genre (i.e. English Patient, Cairo Time, Casablance), where the desert is a stand-in for that place beyond “real life” and quotidian responsibilities. Despite it being a sub-genre that's been done to death, I still found this part of the book really affecting. (And I LOVED the awful British 1940s slang - I say!) Oh, Tom!
A strange, fun story about an administrative assistant from the Ghanaian Embassy in DC who finds out she's a king, or chief, of a small village in coastal Ghana. Written in simple, clear language as if it's a novel, the story is compelling and Peggy's voice is sweet. We get a whirlwind tour of rural Ghanaian culture, development issues, life in DC (!) and some dabs of feminism - all very nice.
At times, the telling of the tale felt a little too pat, especially with the relatively stark distinction between the “good” guys (Peggy, some of her more progressive elders) and the “bad” guys (the mean, crusty old elders). The lack of ambiguity made me a bit doubtful that I was getting the full 360. Similarly, while Peggy's voice is sweet, there is an occasional air of self-congratulatory “holier than thou”-ness. I don't necessarily doubt Peggy's intentions, or even actions, really, but it did slow down the reading a bit.
Huzzah. Really good. SO timely, I felt a FRISSON of timeliness. I used to be all into postmodernism and philosophy and 3rd wave feminism in the mid-00s. I forgot about that VIBE, man. Judith Butler IS that vibe, they EMBODY it. So... okay, I'll be honest, I zoned out at the thousandth time they called “gender ideology” a “phantasm”, overloaded with the anxieties of our climate change-crumbling, authoritarian age. But when I was locked in, mwah, chef's kiss.
I actually think one of the most powerful - and relatively brief - sections of this book was when they discussed climate change anxiety. I've never heard anyone write about that anxiety with such powerful lyricism (!).
I regularly light a candle at my little shrine to the holy Saint James C. Scott, patron saint of understanding the state. This is largely due to Seeing Like a State, which was basically a jarring PARADIGM SHIFT for my brain. Seriously, that book. It makes you reframe everything: statistics, governments, hill people (NEW HAMPSHIRE), last names, everything. It is a very good book.
It is also a super dense book, and a tome, and thus a bit of a slog. Here is bite sized portion, courtesy John Green.
Anyway, anarchy dances around the undercurrent of James C. Scott's most notable works (much like it does under Kim Stanley Robinson's!), and this book is a little throwaway where Scott decides to FACE UP to this anarchy stuff once and for all.
It starts strong, with nice discussions about anonymous, dispersed, disorganized disobedience - jay walking, foot dragging, shirking, burning stuff, breaking stuff, other forms of low-level sabotage - as the roots of anarchist resistance (LA RESISTANCE!). These forms of resistance - silent non-cooperation, mutually agreed upon via game theory-like behaviors (e.g. the norm of driving 65mph in a 55mph zone) - can really gum up the works of society, and Scott argues that it's healthy to maintain these “anarchist calisthenics” and practice our free thinking rule-breakery whenever we can. Throw yourself onto the wheels, and the gears, and the levers, and make the machine stop!
He discusses how, historically, institutions and formalized resistance (e.g. movements with manifestos, leaders, organizations, minutes) have actually been hindrances and choke-holds on organic, dispersed resistance, and how the latter usually prologues the former (as opposed to the opposite).
Anyway, that was all great, and inspiring, and interesting. But then there are digressions which get progressively more tangential, until he's taking pot shots at the Yale tenure system (yo, and I'm sympathetic to how ridiculous the academic tenure system is) and making points so broad that I started to lose focus.
So. It's not a Seeing Like a State, nor the Art of Not Being Governed. It's okay. I feel like I had more anarchist education in Kim Stanley Robinson's books, honestly!
A difficult, but important book.
Difficult for two reasons: first, it tells stories of injustice and despair that are just really hard to read. There's child abuse, poverty, racism. You feel tense, you cringe. I wouldn't say I “enjoyed” reading this. Second, the style - it's elliptical, a little avant garde (I probably missed a lot by listening to the audiobook rather than reading it), and sometimes Toni Morrison leads you down a dreamy, sympathy-inducing detour about a character just to then BAM!! BODY SLAM you with something of their awful doing in the end. BAM! TAKE THAT. I was sometimes left mouth open, horrified.
But! Important, too. Of course. Terrible things happen in America, and they happen due to structural racism. A big part of racism is the whole fantasy that stuff ISN'T this bad, that lives - generations - HAVEN'T been completely ruined, or that it's “all over now”, thanks to the Emancipation Proclamation/the end of segregation/the Civil Rights movement. As we enlarge our understanding of the size and shape of these injustices, we enlarge our compassion and sympathy and, maybe?? political engagement? I dunno. America's never had a real reckoning with its racist past (and present) - not the way post-1960s Germany has had a reckoning with its Nazi crimes, or South Africa its Truth and Reconciliation Commission for apartheid. And so these things have festered (and we get the anti-Obama backlash and rise of Trumpism).
A rare YA book that I find charming and relatable.
I guess I find most YA books these days extremely pedantic and prim. It's like we're fighting the culture war on them? I mean, we are. But it's so very, very moral. Are you Left or are you Right?! I only read the leftist ones, and they're... fine. The way Daniel Tiger is fine. Like, it's good. Daniel Tiger teaches important social-emotional skills. But BOY OH BOY is it a slog of moralizing pedantry. Sing-song “when you get frustrated, take a deep breath, and count to 4!” Or “saying sorry is the first step - then, how can I help?!” My God.
What I yearn for, then, is amoral, imaginative, weirdo YA fiction and children's stories. Take Heidi, for example. The anime. In Heidi, shit is sometimes grim (her parents are dead, indeed, and her forced-parent grandfather is a real grump), and emotions are certainly acknowledged and real, but we're not, like, in a cognitive behavioral therapy session. Ooh, here's a very Jonathan Haidt theory: maybe all this focus on “how can I help?!” and “take a deep breath” and assuming we need to stop and pause and socially-emotionally learn everything is making the kids fragile?! The Death of Resilience?! Maybe the culture will swing back and we'll start re-emphasizing self-sufficiency and resilience and “yeah, life is shit sometimes, oh well, learn to get over it”.
ALL THAT TO SAY. I think I enjoyed this because this is actually a quite grim, Roald Dahl-esque tale of people being grotesque to each other, told through the eyes of innocent, not-always-well-meaning kids. Prosper and Boniface Hartlieb are two German brothers and runaways. Their (single?) mother has just died, and their quite terrible aunt and uncle want to adopt Bo (cuz he's 5 and thus a cute “teddy bear”) and dump Prosper in a boarding school. Their mom was apparently a big-time romantic, who filled their heads with tales of Venice's glory. So they flee there - jumping trains from Hanover (or was it Hamburg?) to Venice.
They land in the city of canals in the year 2000 - aka, cell phones but ALSO fax machines. Flooding, pigeon shit, AND SO MANY TOURISTS. They take up with a gang of street children led by a charismatic, snobby little peacock named Scipio, who calls himself the Thief Lord - so wily are his break-ins.
Plot #1: Prosper and Bo's aunt and uncle enlist the services of a cheapo detective to come hunting for the kids.
Plot #2: A mysterious “Conte” (Count) hires the Thief Lord to steal a mysterious piece of wood for a mysterious purpose. Such mystery!
So I enjoyed this quite a bit, especially more and more as the story went on. I just, like, APPRECIATED FUNKE'S CHOICES, MAN. e.g. There was something Studio Ghibli-ish about how independent and resilient the kids are; they are just making their way, man. I also appreciated that villainy was MOSTLY not one-note (with two notable exceptions) - like, I was surprised and delighted by how some of the characters came around and were welcomed. The book also jumps the shark a bit towards the end, but I was 100% here for it - it aligned with the general fantasy-ness of being a kid.
I listened to this as an audiobook with a talented and very English narrator; I would have LOVED to have heard this in Italian, since I think that would have really set the scene more - especially with the Venetian accents and German accents and so on. Apparently they made this into a movie in the mid 2000s?
I listened to the BBC radio production of this, starring David Tennant as Benedick and Samantha Spiro as Beatrice.
Soooo. The one thing that kinda sucks about Much Ado is that I absorbed Kenneth Branagh's 1993 film version so completely - it is so baked into my cells now - that I cannot NOT hear Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson, Robert Sean Leonard, Denzel Washington, and even KEANU in these roles. I realize, also, now, that the reason the 1993 movie version is so baked into my DNA is that that movie is like the Platonic ideal of a Shakespearean adaptation: it's peak Branagh, peak Emma Thompson, peak Tuscany, PEAK ALL OF THEM. They are perfect. And so every other version feels like they're just doing sad/not-so-good impressions of Them. Even David Tennant and his adorable Scottish accent is still like, “ya well Ken is so good tho” OH IDEA HOW ABOUT A SLASH FIC VERSION OF TWO BENEDICKS: KENNETH AND DAVID - WE CAN CALL IT “MUCH ADO ABOUT NOSLASH” Oooh that'd be good.
Anyway, compare:
- David Tennant and Catherine Tate - such a great duo, both of them so good too, in this scene: “Lady Beatrice, have you wept all this while?”
- Now compare the 1993 version of the same scene
I mean, it's like, David Tennant and Catherine Tate are good - great, even - but Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson are PERFECT. They are the Platonic ideal of PERFECT SHAKESPEARE. And this BBC radio version, alas, does not have Catherine Tate. So it's just - okay-to-good.
Anyway, this all reminded me of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom, which I read in high school and deeply informed my understanding of this play, namely:
- That Benedick and Beatrice are actually old flames: Marry, once before he won it of me with false dice... etc etc
- That “nothing” was pronounced “no” “thing” and was slang for vagina!?
- That this play is about marital realism and how Benedick and Beatrice won't live “happily ever after”, but that's fine.
I spent 90% of this book thinking about the movie Troy. I think the audiobook narrator did too. He was TOTALLY doing a Sean Bean impression for Odysseus.
Anyway, this book was tactile, earthy, rich. My book club went on and on about how the writing was sub-par but they are VERY WRONG, I loved this writing. It was like mid-2000s fanfic. In fact, I even started to suspect that Madeline Miller was a livejournal fanfic author I was reading in the mid-2000s, post-Troy, post-LOTR fannish euphoria: QueenOfThorns, is that you???
Super fun. I love these big, bombastic, heroic legends brought down to (fanfic) human size. This was great.
Kind of a fun fantasy, presented simply and straightforwardly and thus probably good for younger readers (I'm guessing around 10-11ish?). Alanna likes to fight. Her brother (whose name I have ALREADY FORGOTTEN) wants to do magic stuff. They live in Your Standard High Fantasy land with prepackaged Tolkien derivative Euro-ness. So, it's kinda like an Age of Chivalry thing - the main thrust of the book is Alanna cross-dressing as a boy so she can become a knight! She goes to... uh, knight's school? Hogwarts for Knights. There, she becomes a page (a freshman?), looking up to the squires (sophomores/juniors?). There is some bullying (mostly she bullies this jerk kid). There is a teenage thief king, a la Rufio from Hook.
I mean, it was fine. I didn't love it. It reads very easily, so you finish it quickly, but I feel like giving this to a kid is like, okay, meh, here you go, girl power to you. Inoffensive, but also milquetoast.
A quick, helpful read about avoiding some (common?) mistakes when raising more than one kid.
The setup paints a grim picture indeed of sibling rivalry: the authors basically begin with the assumption that siblings are in a death match for their parent's love. They use a (VERY HILARIOUS) polygamy metaphor that I've now told everyone about, it made me laugh so much. The rest of the book follows a simplified, Socratic “parent's group meeting” format - with each chapter covering some main sibling topics: NOT assigning roles within the family (“the clean one”, “the smart one”), NOT comparing/contrasting (even benignly, e.g. “oh, did you see how your brother did that so well”, “why can't you be more like your sister”), NOT giving into the false fairness of “everything equal” (i.e. attend to each kid's individual needs, rather than assuming everyone gets the same X or Y), and - overall - encouraging them to figure out their problems themselves (no parent/authority referees, only stepping in when things get dangerous). I found that all sensible enough, and even challenging to implement (I can definitely see how comparing and assigning roles would help give me, the parent, some feeling of control/understanding of the obvious differences that come up among individuals). Overall, as with any parenting, the main guidelines of treat them like individuals (not projects or avatars), with respect, and establish boundaries seem to apply as the numbers go up and your household becomes more chaotic.
Anyway, fun and easy to read, and gave me a lot of good food for thought.
Yooo. This book was TRANSFORMATIVE. I feel like an entire part of my brain unlocked after reading this. I felt like I had one of those couch therapy breakthroughs that you can see on TV representations of Freudian psychotherapy. I felt like this book gave me insight into one of Buddhism's great teachings: blue sky mind. That you are all you need. That things are deeply, fundamentally okay - even when they suuuuck. But that often, for us lucky people living well-off in a First World country, we build this carapace of anxiety-driven sucking, we - ahem - SEEK DRAMA, where there is only truly privilege, blessings, and joy.
Yo. So there's this one sci-fi book, Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman, where First World soldiers are operating drone killer robots in various Third World proxy wars using fancy mind-melding tech. In the end, SPOILER, the protagonist - fed up with bombing poor villagers - realizes that, if you stay in the mind-melding tech for too long, your brain does NOT get fried (as his superiors had threatened), but rather your brain explodes into an all-encompassing compassion-gasm. You are, literally, one with everything. You are everyone else's mind, everyone else's mind is yours. And so you are then incapable of committing violence. You can't see Us and Them anymore.
Anyway, I always enjoyed that ending, it stuck with me for many years, because it just felt kinda authentic and true (and fun and funky!). And, in my real life, I would read self-help articles or have wise people say things about how “self-care is important” and “be kind to yourself”. And I was like, yeah yeah, but wtf does that MEAN?
Now I know. Thanks, Neff! I feel like this is going to be one of those foundational texts for me, like when I discovered cognitive behavioral therapy (also so good!). Even though the book, AS A BOOK, has its faults (Neff's POV can seem very specifically white/hetero/etc etc, yes yes, you can wave your spear of social justice at it; and yes, it's a bit overly long and there are moments that felt a little too woo), I was surprised by how deeply it affected my thinking, how it unlocked so many things for me.
There's a type of meditation practice in Buddhism called metta meditation, or loving-kindness meditation. I was always pro it in theory, but ughhhh I just hated it in practice. I just didn't get it! And I resented sitting there being “forced” to think soft fuzzy thoughts about the world. UGH. UGHHHH.
Similarly, in Buddhism, there's this idea of the blue sky mind. The Headspace app guy talks about it a lot. Like, after sitting there, meditating, watching your thoughts come and go, you start to see them like clouds. And what's beyond the clouds? Just a bright blue sky. Even when you're sad as shit and everything is hard, you can liken that to a deeply overcast day - or a hurricane. But, Headspace app guy says, if you went above those clouds in a plane, you'd see a sunny blue sky again. I always liked this image, like I enjoyed it as a fantasy, but - again - I don't think I deeply believed it. I was like, yeah, well, some people are depressed and wtf is blue sky anyway? NOW I GET IT. There's always going to be the sturdy base of self-compassion!
Anyway. So: it's excellent. I think this book could change the world. I'm not even being facetious or exaggerating. I felt very, very convinced, and very inspired. Forever Peace indeed!
For the tiny perfectionist in your life. I loved this, so did my kid. Highlights:
- The cheering paparazzi crowds outside her breakfast table window. HA.
- The juggling performance. WHO AMONG US has not felt that their achievement addiction was an elaborate and existentially pointless juggling act of random items?! Sigh.
V v v good. A balm to the soul.
I wanted to read this book after watching the movie of the same name, starring Colin Firth, Nicole Kidman and Stellan Skarsgard. Unfortunately, the movie's just OK (the trailer, OTOH, is great) - and you finish it feeling like you've just watched a mediocre telling of an incredible story.
The story is incredible indeed: Eric Lomax was a young Scotsman in his early 20s when he went to Singapore with the British Army during WW2. Singapore eventually fell to Japan, and Lomax spent over three years as a prisoner of war in the infamous “River Kwai” labor camps. While there, he and a few other officers cobbled together a radio - they were caught, and severely tortured (including waterboarding). After the war, Lomax tried - but mostly struggled - to resume a post-war life. Obviously traumatized, and seething with hatred for the Japanese (especially the meek interpreter who was present for the worst of the interrogations), he eventually discovered - in the 1980s - that that very interpreter was called Takashi Nagase and had spent his entire post-war life seeking to atone for what had happened. Lomax and Nagase made contact in the late 80s/early 90s and planned to meet, a vengeful Lomax initially plotting to make Nagase suffer - perhaps even to kill him - but things took an amazing turn when the real connection was made. Lomax's ultimate forgiveness of Nagase - and his amazement that they should find themselves, in their 70s, laughing and crying together as “blood brothers”, visiting memorial sites in Japan and Cambodia together - is moving, even spiritual.
I was startled by how good the writing was, given this was a personal memoir by a non-writer. But Lomax's writing is clear and powerful. Beyond the core story, there's the general theme of industrialization as a source of both the greatest 20th century excitement (Lomax was a huuuuge trains nerd) and the greatest suffering (the Burma railway line was a death trap, and Lomax notes that laying railway lines were always death traps; he also notes how trains were a crucial part of the infrastructure of genocide and war during WW2). Lomax is explicit about this deep ambiguity; about how naive he was, pre-war, in worshipping at the altar of industrial efficiency and machine progress. There's also much painful insight about how private, even willfully hidden, the trauma of veterans can be; even though we all worship the “greatest generation” now, Lomax describes how POWs were seen as “layabouts” who had sat out the war by ignorant, hypocritical folks back home. You sense his real fear that the suffering that the POWs went through would be minimized, trivialized (or glorified/romanticized, as in Bridge on the River Kwai), or entirely forgotten.
Anyway, really good. Recommended.
A sweet, chaotic book about the sweetness and chaos of toddlers. David, or as he should be always called OH DAVID,
- refuses to eat
- has a giant stinky diaper
- fights getting dressed
- and stands up, wide awake and laughing, when it's bedtime
All of this to say, he is a Basic Toddler. And you too will enjoy shouting “OH, DAVID, I LOVE YOU” at the end. Embrace the chaos.
What I love about this book - and I've loved it since I was a little kid - is the just GLORIOUS SELF-PITY OF THE DUCKLING. He really draaaags himself through the mud: OH WOOOOE IS MEEEEE. He's ugly. UGGGLYYYYYY. Everyone is CRUUUUEEELLL to him.
If you have, deep in your heart, a self-pitying, grandiosely dramatic theater kid - as I do - then this is catnip. And here, the catnip is gorgeously illustrated and we really luxuriate in the self-pity wallowing, while also getting that satisfying “guess what u r a swan and everyone else is a common-ass duck, HA HA”. Chef's kiss. Probably bad values, but who cares, it's great.
6/5 stars! A wonderful, enlightening look at moral psychology and how it explains religious and political divides, especially those in the US.
I had low expectations for this book's explanatory power, but I reckoned it would be interesting to read anyway. But no! It really does explain things! Very convincingly! A lot of Haidt's interpretations of experimental psychology really resonated with my life experiences (n=1).
The main crux of the argument is that our moral sense evolved to have six dominant “tastes”: a taste for Care/harm, Fairness/cheating, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, Sanctity/degradation, and Liberty/oppression. If you're very WEIRD (Western educated industrialized rich and democratic) and left-leaning, then you only really “taste” two of them - care and fairness - and kinda throw out the rest (e.g. authority is just a means to oppression and not something to be intrinsically valued; it's OK to sacrifice overall liberty if it protects disadvantaged groups). If you're more conservative (on the US political spectrum), then you taste all six, fairly equally. If you're NOT WEIRD, then you taste all six, also fairly equally.
This was so interesting! And YES, I THINK IT'S TRUE.
Haidt talks about how his work in Orissa, India, helped him to wake up to non-WEIRD more-than-just-those-2 moral tastes. And YES, I remember that the only time I really emotionally understood the more communal/social, less individualistic, morality that prizes respect for authority and loyalty to your in-group was the wonderful Hindi movie, Virasat (ugh, I need to fix my blog pics). Virasat is a moral fable that pits “Western individualism” against “Eastern communalism”. I mean, lots of Hindi films did and do that, but Virasat was the first that opened my eyes to the moral failings of Western individualism and the, well, righteousness of “dharma” (i.e. your role/duty).
I loved, actually, how Haidt also centralized these moral philosophical distinctions in the Enlightenment, when individualism exploded into the Western consciousness as a dominant cultural force - a force more morally powerful than family ties, the Church's moral authority, and so on. Sometimes it's funny to realize your highly specific, individual thoughts are actually the product of centuries of philosophical debate and cultural groove-making. Or, in other words, sacred values are man-made and culturally agreed-upon!
This also helpfully explained my blindness (and liberals' collective blindness), as I've found it harder and harder to understand conservative Republicans in the US (especially in the age of Trump). “Why would ANYONE choose to be Republican?” I would often ask myself. I tried listening to the Intelligence Squared podcast debate, Do liberals hold the moral high ground? But even with David Brooks articulating conservative POVs pretty well, I nodded in agreement MUCH more with the liberal side (led by Howard Dean, who made some great points also about the #MeToo movement and current LGBT political issues as a culture-wide renegotiation of gender). But this book! It made me understand! Not only did I better understand WHY some people are conservative (they have the six tastes!), but it helped me understand why I couldn't understand them (liberals are actually worse at understanding conservative viewpoints than vice-versa!).
Another thing I've ALSO often wondered about is, “Why am I a Democrat?” As they say, my earliest memories are of liberal issues. I was a tiny conscientious Democrat at age 10 - reading 50 Simple Things You Can Do To Save the Planet, wearing my “color blind” t-shirt (with cartoon kids of different races holding hands), and participating in Amnesty International letter-writing campaigns to release political prisoners. I mean. I was 13 MAX. WTF was I doing?! My parents, fwiw, were and are not liberals. No one in my family is. SO WHAT HAPPENED?! Where did my political beliefs - which were always so strong - come from!?!
This book even covered that! I was actually most skeptical of this section initially - where experimental psych research demonstrated genetic pre-dispositions, e.g., on threat sensitivity (conservatives are skittish; sorry, conservatives) and novelty seeking (liberals like weird stuff), but especially how initial (formative!) experiences along the 6-taste spectrum can start you on a motivated reasoning/confirmation bias until you find yourself, as an adult, firmly entrenched in a political team. (This also made me super interested in people who switch political teams as adults - e.g. Christopher Hitchens, or this person I met at a book club recently. I'd LOVE to learn more about that journey, since you're changing your in-group!)
Anyway, I would place this book somewhere between Big Gods (which wonderfully explained religion in an evolutionary psych way) and The Unwinding (about America's slow, horrible decline into political polarization). Oh yeah, and I forgot: yes, it really is all Newt Gingrich's fault. SHAME ON YOU, NEWT!!!
Totally crazy, dynamic experience. I spent the first two chapters just completely distracted by the zooming, swishing panels and figures, and getting all a-lather by the enriched, “add-on” stuff (little blinking stars showing you more information), the archival news footage, the background music, the sound effects, the craziness!
But once my brain and senses accustomed to this full-metal onslaught, I started to enjoy the story for its own sake. Based on a couple non-fic books, this graphic novel-cum-crazy tells the story of the 1953 Iranian coup, where Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh was ousted in a CIA-orchestrated scheme.
The true story is powerful, and this telling is an emotional roller coaster. It covers a lot of the same ground as Argo (jaded CIA agent running around Tehran riots, “Death to [insert your problem here]!” chants, etc.), but does it waaay better. This is a multifaceted, rich tale which leverages a multifaceted, rich medium - the iPad - to tell a story to its fullest. I learned LOADS, and I'm hungry for more.
On the meta level, this was just a really interesting, trailblazing experience. I didn't think it would work: how could they successfully bridge the reading with the cinematic experiences? Essentially, this is just a LOUD book. But once your ears are accustomed to it, the soundtrack really starts to add to it. Same with the buzzing, chanting, screeching sound effects. I also am so glad I read (watched? experienced?) this after reading Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, as my brain was already abuzz with all the potentials of the comix medium - and this was just such a medium pusher. (I'm disappointed that McCloud hasn't commented on this specifically. Oh well!)