Thomas
This is probably closer to a 3.5 for me. James writes lovingly about his mother, and the stories he shares about their youths and upbringings are interesting and endearing.
I had a hard time getting past James's consistent use of “Mommy” in referring to his mom. Adults referring to their parents as mommy or daddy always makes me cringe a little. I understand that to a point this is a regional/cultural/generational thing, but for me it's too much. It doesn't come across as warm for me. I call my mom “Mom” and she's in my phone by her first and last name, not “mom” so... It felt weird every time I saw it, which of course was every page.
James's faith is clearly important to him, and to his mother. They both talk more or less non-stop about it and its role in their development and lives. For James's mother, this is a critical element of the story, and the movement between Judaism and Christianity is interesting. For James's story, it seems less interesting and more like sermonizing. James does a lot of sermonizing in his other books, and usually I have to just grin and bear it.
The most interesting thing about this book, for me, is having it change my read of his two most recent books, Deacon King Kong (my favorite of his) and The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store (my least favorite of his that I've read). These books clearly feature characters and stories from his childhood and the history of his mother, sometimes adapted and sometimes not so much. James talks about this in particular with Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, but reading this enriched them both for me.
This is one of the best books that I've ever bought on an impulse based on cover art. I had heard nothing about the book before picking it up and wow! What a treat. I love all the characters that we see, the locations are amazing, and the whole pirate thing is so different from what I usually read that it was a ton of fun.
I would say the last third of the book as we got into some slightly more magical stuff was not perfect for me, but it also never verged into annoying or too crazy.
I really enjoyed this and will recommend it while also eagerly awaiting the next book!
I didn't know who Linda was until the Get Back documentary. I picked this up at the library and really enjoyed seeing the pictures she took over her career. Many of them are stunning. Some of my favorites include:
-Janis Joplin, LA 1967
-Local Men, Scotland, ‘68
- Nico, LA ‘68
- Windowsill, Scotland ‘73
- Man in Hat, Martinique ‘76
- Paul, London ‘78 (mirror picture - fantastic!!)
The book has some interesting writing. The first sentence is 52 words long. Two pages later, there is a 112-word sentence that has 13 commas and a semicolon. I kept wondering–is this bad writing, or is it intentional to reflect the thought process of the narrator?
I wondered that frequently through the book. It is split into 5 parts, but really, there are 3 distinct episodes. A flashback in the middle did not do anything for me; I didn't feel like it added anything and, in fact, sort of diminished my thoughts of the protagonist.
The “story” is sort of not. In book club this evening, I called this a “vibes book” because the story seems secondary to the author's description of nature, the cabin, and the sometimes hallucinatory experiences of the protagonist. The story meanders and doesn't really go anywhere, and has what I feel is an odd ending.
Quite a good examination of why technical projects in government fail. I shook my head and sighed a lot recognizing discussions, mindsets, etc., that I've encountered too. The author connects to a lot of useful examples and even some methodologies, but ultimately this is a book that seeks to inspire further research rather than provide a practical starter kit. That's not a bad thing — the book introduces the reader to user-/human-centered design, agile methods, and on a simpler level the idea that traditional process is not always the best process.
Overall, the book retains much of what made it interesting and compelling on my first read of it around the time it came out. I think some sections of the book are less compelling on a re-read because of the way they are written - those parts of the book that blend narration and quotation with story retelling start to feel overdone.
Similarly, the organizing structure of the book does a lot of handholding — sometimes too much, and makes the reader feel like the author thinks they might be stupid. I'm not sure how much of this impression is because I am re-reading this after seeing the adaptation “Origin” which lifts so much of the text word-for-word for narration/voice-over. Possibly a lot.
Those two points aside, this remains a great contemporary text that is accessible and approachable for people.
I really enjoyed this! It has the Standard Science Fiction thing of really weird character names, but I got over that fast. The world is interesting, the systems are interesting, and the characters are compelling. I enjoyed the writing overall, minus a few instances of dialogue that I felt didn't work (mostly between Mahit and her predecessor).
Wow, beautiful and crushing.
“Because the days are yoked together, one starts and another is inevitably on the way, and then another , and another, and they must be endured. Because man is a pathetic creature, he cannot raise his knife and say, “I can no longer endure myself.” He will solve nothing by sticking the knife into his belly. Because the days come and go like an endless herd tromping through an open gate.”
This was a gift from my sister for Christmas this year. I really enjoyed it! As a (translated) novelization of the film, it has about the same little oddities that the film has. This would be a great book to gift a child who has been reading smaller things and is ready for something a little longer, but with writing that is approachable — especially if the child likes the movie!
My sister let me look over a copy of this while I was home for Christmas. I skimmed through all of the little parables / stories that serve as an intro to each chapter and focused on the author's assertions / descriptions. There is a lot of basic behavioral theory here, a lot of CBT. It's packaged in a very approachable way and I like the graphics / tables that are set out. I particularly liked “Goodhart's Law” — the notion that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
The book does have the common self-help scaffolding: start with a parable/anecdote/story, move into a basic description of a principle/method, apply the principle/method to the anecdote, then summarize. This makes it feel a little like a textbook but it does make it very skimmable and easy to reference later.
I appreciated the detailed notes section in the back. That said, I think I'm learning that I prefer a bibliography.
Can't believe how long it took me to get through this! For some reason I had trouble really committing to it. There was a lot going on at different parts and I felt like it all sort of came clamoring to an end in the last 150 pages. I enjoyed the world and magic system. Some of the characters were pretty grating to me (the “funny” mercenaries in particular, I started to loathe scenes with them), others I appreciated more as time went on (Vivenna is probably one of the better characters in the book).
I'm not totally convinced that the ending makes sense, but I really enjoyed the last 150 or so pages. I think the book is about 200 pages too long, and I'd have enjoyed it a lot more if some of it were trimmed out.
Like many Vonnegut books, this is an almost rambling (coherently so) account from the protagonist about the circumstances of their life. Vonnegut is one of my favorite writers when it comes to satire, and this one explores guns and violence, the bomb, and to an extent small town life. It not my favorite of his writings, but I still enjoyed it.
I love noir and detective movies, I especially love noir detective movies. I'm not sure how I've read so much but never hit Chandler, one of the Ur-detective-noir novelists. Written in 1939 and in the genre its in, it's no surprise to find dated language and characterizations some (including myself) would find offensive today. You have to set that aside because they are ultimately manifestations of the world and setting Chandler is writing in. I loved the over-the-top noir of it all.
This was one of the most bizarre and intense books I've read in recent memory. About halfway through, I thought, “I'm going to have to re-read this as soon as I finish it.” That thought wasn't anxiety, it was thrill. I'm going to do all I can to resist that urge and give it some space before a re-read. I loved this but couldn't tell you at all what I thought about it in detail yet, 5 minutes after finishing it.
(2/5)
——
When I was in high school, we lived in a little * apartment in rural Illinois. It was across the street, a short walk from the factory where my mom (and several relatives) worked. We were on the South side of the tracks - a small open field separated us from them. Trains no longer run through this track and haven't for years, as far as I know. I used to walk over to the high school, only about a mile away, but rarely with sidewalks available.
My mom was a single parent after the separation. I remember her working various jobs—mostly waitressing and factory work, often two at a time. I remember walking home from school one day and seeing a pink paper on our front door. I don't know the specifics of that one, but I've seen enough in the years since to know it was a 5-day notice or some equivalent. This would have been 2010 or so. It might seem hard to believe that someone working two (sometimes three jobs, one under the table because of what this book calls the “cliff effect”) couldn't afford the rent on an apartment. Yet, I'm here to tell you that was reality for my family then.
That's as close as I ever got to homelessness. What intervened in my life then wasn't an assistance program—it was one of my high school teachers who found out about this and paid three months of our rent anonymously. I thought about this a lot years later when I ran a rent assistance program, where people would sit across from a desk and tell me their story, and I would have to be the one to decide if we could pay 3 to 6 months of their rent, and sometimes advocate their case to my manager. That memory isn't what drew me to work with people experiencing homelessness and the policies that impact them, but it was on my mind a lot as I read Adler & Burnes's book.
I've been working in roles serving people experiencing homelessness since 2016, more or less, now working in a policy job rather than direct service. For this reason, I kept having to calibrate what I was looking for from this book. I didn't go in expecting something like “Homelessness is a Housing Problem” or “Poverty, by America” — I went in expecting a work exploring the deep moral injury(1) that occurs when we—the richest nation in the history of the world—walk by our fellows in calloused squalor, begging for subsistence. How do we function, the feelings of uncomfortability, the confusion, the knowledge that this should not be possible, with the evidence of it before our eyes and our frequent decision to do nothing but stare steely-eyed ahead?
That is not precisely what this book is. Adler and Burnes spend time discussing relational poverty—a kind of poverty in social networks and social capital—and how this weaves around the experience of being homeless and the systems that fail and struggle to serve those experiencing homelessness. Essentially, it is a primer on contemporary homelessness and graspable interventions to which the individual can contribute.
This works well as a relatively shallow introduction. It gives the lay of the land and enough information for informed conversations with their peers. That's a tremendous value.
It has a few problems. Some of these have to do with writing mechanics, and I'll save those (maybe snobbish) thoughts for last.
While reading the introduction, I started to feel a little uncomfortable. Without getting technical, I got the willies. Andrew Yang adorns the book's cover with a blurb at the top. Yang's political candidacies have been a little odd, but his thoughts on UBI are at least (as far as I know) coherent. Yet, I tend to be suspicious of venture capitalists, especially when the very rich come into communities trying to serve the very poor. I dismissed this, and then, in the introduction, we began to hear a lot about Adler's work with Miracle Messages, and I got those willies again. Adler's intro seemed to suggest some kind of white savior complex to me, or maybe a variation of, “We're venture capitalists/start-up bros, and we're here to help.” This did not ultimately seem to be accurate as I continued to read, but it made me defensive going in.
A contributor to this may be the concept of Miracle Messages, which seems to take more or less untrained volunteers and pair them with people experiencing homelessness in a buddy system for phone check-ins. I wonder about the support given to the volunteers, how these relationships form and sustain, and if they're healthy. Perhaps that is cynicism—volunteers encroaching on social work territory, and my reaction is some ingrained thing. It's a gut reaction, that's all. Perhaps it's a manifestation of my allergy to all things vaguely religious and the name “miracle.” Loneliness is an epidemic, and Adler and Burnes's case for relational poverty is sound. I think the idea of a buddy phone program is interesting. Sometimes, it felt like a commercial for the program. Maybe that's not a bad thing?
Similarly, in the last chapter, a few paragraphs detail what readers can do to invest themselves in ending homelessness. The authors dedicate a whole page to listing start-up/non-profit-ish social entrepreneurship things, some of which crowdfund money for people experiencing homelessness. I find this dystopian. This shouldn't be necessary; this should be a tax-funded initiative, and we shouldn't have to rely on crowdfunding to satisfy the basic needs of the people in this country. Well, shoulda, woulda, coulda. Various levels of government presently fail to widely program basic income, direct cash assistance, affordable medical care, affordable tuition, affordable housing, etc. So, in the meantime, I guess social entrepreneurship is where it's at.
There is a recurring theme in the book on paternalism (a whole chapter and more). Yet, the book does not well address the realities of paternalism (progressive or punitive), with concepts like involuntary psychiatric holds. The book explores (BRIEFLY) the idea of forced hospitalization and does not dwell on how to square this with its previous writing on paternalism. The ethics of involuntary hospitalization of people experiencing homelessness is topical and rich for exploration. Yet, the book gives it only one paragraph (not even in the original chapter on paternalism or mental health). This is about as far as the book goes: “Furthermore, since involuntary treatment can easily be misused, it is critical that health care professionals determine that the individual is in desperate need of hospitalization before they are committed” (p. 197). I was disappointed that the book did not think more about this difficulty.
The authors routinely put “the homeless” in quotations and frequently discuss that they feel this moniker will be as gross (in time) as people referring to LGBTQ+ people as “the homosexuals.” They make this point at least three times in the book, but only the last time did I understand what they were saying. In the first instance, “the homeless” is quickly grouped with “people experiencing homelessness” and “the unhoused” in the argument, and I thought to understand that they didn't like ANY grouping term (as they specifically note that people experiencing homelessness are frequently termed in homogenous ways). The book's final pages clarify that they are espousing support for Person-First Language (which is good!). The authors could have communicated their point more clearly. It is worth recognizing that when we talk about homogenous references vs. specific references to groups of people within a larger group, there is power in that larger grouping category. Adler and Burnes frequently bring up the LGBTQ+ community as a reference point for language (i.e., “the homosexuals” and the concept of being closeted). I hope people do not read this and seek to stop using terms like “people experiencing homelessness” in favor of something more discrete like “a person who couch surfs” or “someone who sleeps in their car.” This distinction makes these groups appear smaller and easier to hide. Being able to have an umbrella term like “the gay community” (and eventually, “the LGBTQ+ community”) helped take us from Stonewall to Obergefell in less than 50 years. We can understand, identify, and respect more specific groupings while holding onto the power that comes from big numbers.
Finally, I had some concerns about the writing. The authors have striven for so much organization that they have overorganized, and as a result, the book is repetitive. Some of the same stories and anecdotes appear several times, and this is not necessary in a book that's fewer than 250 pages. Each chapter ends with a “Key Takeaways” section, which repeats some elements of the previous 5 or 10 pages of the chapter. Then, the penultimate chapter (“Fixing Broken Systems”) goes chapter-by-chapter with suggestions, restating the same statistics or stories. These notes, which were so powerful in their first use, are drained with every subsequent recurrence because they feel like disorganization rather than being the beat of a theme. In a second edition, I would suggest doing away with Chapter 12 and integrating solution sections in each topic chapter, allowing more efficient use of the reader's time and the book's page count.
Mechanically, the writing is passable but not great. Sometimes, this is just me being fussy about a terrible abundance of adverbs (the most criminal of these is on page 145: “One of the most ubiquitous developments” — ubiquitous means everywhere or totally! Skim away all of this unneeded text. Let's get on with it!). But sometimes, the phrasing is so poor as to appear careless and misleading to the reader. The most notable is on page 96: “And many local public housing authorities make it illegal to rent to someone with a felony conviction...” The problem is that a layperson may read this and somehow think that PHA's get to tell renters who they can and can't rent to — they can't. PHAs cannot determine what is and isn't illegal; they can only set policy within the guidelines set by Congress and, to a lesser extent, HUD. To say that PHAs can “make it illegal” is misleading. PHAs can and do set rules about approving people with felony convictions for vouchers- a bad practice that should be explained clearly in this text so that people can understand who sets that policy and to whom they should advocate in their community.
——
Overall, I would recommend this book to the layperson for a good primer on homelessness broadly and the ways many different systems intersect to make it difficult to escape it. The book could benefit by offering more information to the reader, such as who sets policies where and how to engage in advocacy around them. I am concerned that many of this book's solutions revolve around social entrepreneurs benefiting from unpaid volunteer work and, to a much lesser extent, local non-profits where direct service could help, but not at all around direct advocacy to local, State, and Federal policymakers.
(1) “Moral injury is the damage done to one's conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that transgress one's own moral beliefs, values, or ethical codes of conduct.” https://moralinjuryproject.syr.edu/about-moral-injury/
(Edit July 2024: while talking with my mom recently, I found out that we weren't in a section 8 apartment — we were in something that was low income, but they wouldn't accept section 8. Those visits I remember to the housing authority were applying, but either not getting or getting but not finding somewhere to take it, apparently. I corrected the above paragraph.)
The first part of this book—Frankl's exploration of his time and experiences in concentration camps and the impact these horrors had on his psyche and that of those around him—is very good. There isn't really much I can say on it that isn't said better elsewhere.
The second part, his primer on Logotherapy, was not really for me. It is very clearly something of its time and there is much about it that I like as a social worker and someone who works with people. That said, it doesn't resonate anything like the first part which really is a special work.
If you're skimming goodreads reviews wondering if you should read this or not, just skip this review. I bought the book because I'm a fool.
There I was, in my little local bookshop one day for their summer sale. There I was, such a fool, spotting THE WASTE LANDS from across the room, this giant edition with author's notes. “Oh look, T.S. Elliot. He was Lawrence of Arabia, you know?” I said to my friend who was with me. I'd always known that Lawrence of Arabia wrote a book or something and that the film was in some way apparently inspired by this. Awfully small little paperback for such a long film.
Reader, T.E. Lawrence and T.S. Elliot are not the same person. They were born in the same year, but in different countries and certainly had different experiences. In picking up T.S. Elliot's The Waste Land, I mistook it for what I found out later that afternoon was actually T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. By some bizarre cosmic coincidence, both works have 1922 as a year of origin (though Lawrence's work was only finished in 1922, it didn't release until 1926, apparently).
In any event, the book was bought and on my shelf and now it's read and on my shelf. Unfortunately for me, I'm not much for poetry and when I read it I feel a little like Brad Pitt in Seven—smashing my head on the limits of my intelligence. Reportedly, TS Elliot is one of the 20th Century's greatest poets and this one of the greatest poems of the 20th century. I wouldn't have known it if Google hadn't told me, because reading it didn't mean anything for me. Bummer.
Thrilling!
At first, I struggled to get into it. I think because of the plethora of names, locations, factions, etc., that are explored to set the scenery. Possibly because I knew absolutely nothing at all about The Troubles except whatever I've picked up from the odd Tom Clancy book/movie (and, thus, very probably less than nothing).
The book is exceptionally well paced, and the author threads the stories so delicately that when the pictures start to come together there are times when you can't help but sit upright.
The book explores themes of moral injury and ambiguous loss in ways I find deeply fascinating. More, the book explores the stories communities tell themselves and how factions interact with communities as mitigators and agitators. From page 402:
“In the intertwining lives of Jean McConville, Dolours Price, Brendan Hughes, and Gerry Adams, I saw an opportunity to tell a story about how people become radicalized in their uncompromising devotion to a cause, and about how individuals—and a whole society—make sense of political violence once they have passed through the crucible and finally have time to reflect.”
A great opportunity, and there are plenty of things we can view as analogous re: how populations/communities warp around themselves.
Great read — would recommend!
This is at least my third time reading The Gunslinger. The first was way back in Junior High, with my first attempt at the cycle (I cried off at either Wolves of Calla or Song of Susannah). The second was with the audiobooks a few years ago.
The first of the audiobooks at the time was read by George Guidall, who I came to associate more with Les Miserables than The Dark Tower. I like George's narration, and I loved Frank Muller's narration of a few of the Tower books he narrated. I found myself reading Gunslinger this time in a merge of their voices, fitting perfectly.
This is my first read of Gunslinger after having completed the cycle once. I find it rewarding. There's so much here that echoes throughout the rest of the cycle and it is sweet to feel it all again. I forgot how much Susan Delgado is in this, and every time I saw her name I wanted to go back into Hambry.
I'm excited to be reading through these again. I meant to dive right into Drawing of the Three after finishing this, but my library turned up with Duma Key (one of my all time fav King books), so I'll have to hold off until I can get that one through again.
I really enjoyed this! I found it a little slow to start, and kind of disorientating for two reasons. 1) Unlike many (most?) of King's books, this isn't set in Maine, but in Illinois (my home state), so it felt pretty close to home. 2) The protagonist is a high school kid, in high school at roughly the same year that I graduated high school. This caused some odd friction when King writes about “opening up Safari” or “going to the Tube” or “everything's on the Net” which is “awesome sauce.”
Thankfully, once the story gets going, we get into stuff that is much more in the ol' wheelhouse and this turns into a lovely fairy tale of fairy tales. I had a lot of fun reading this.